My late father was a watchmaker, and had his own small jewellery store. He wasn’t an officially appointed railroad watch inspector, but his store was in a neighbourhood where many railroaders lived. So he repaired a lot of railroad watches for these fellows. He wasn’t a Hamilton watch dealer, but when he was asked to supply Hamilton railroad watch, he was able to obtain them.
I recall one time, in 1957, he had ordered a Hamilton 992B for a railroader. When it arrived in his store, I was in my teens, and as much as I was doing watch repairs at that time, I had never seen a 992B. I was intrigued. Get this! The retail price on the 992B at that time, was $195.00, (Cdn.)
It was about at that same time, that the Hamilton Electric watch arrived on the market. I recall that he had ordered one of those on approval. Battery powered watches in 1957 were a hot item. Not that there were many in the marketplace or on the wrists of people, but the buzz was noticeable. My father ended up sending the Hamilton Electric, back. He must have had a feeling that that the watch was going to be trouble, and wanted no part of it. Oh how right he was! Hamilton spent a decade from the Electric’s introduction, trying make the thing work. They finally ended up buying the Buren Watch Co. of Switzerland, developer of the thin micro rotor automatic movement. Hamilton did this, as they replaced a lot of unsatisfactory Hamilton Electrics with Hamilton Thin-O-Matics, as they called the Buren. I have a feeling that this fiasco was one of the reasons that Hamilton bit the dust. People lost confidence in the brand, and they cost themselves a lot of money, and market share.
