fun fact about elgin- the only US manufacturer that produced a free-sprung movement. also, and I've gotten into arguments about this, the only US manufacturer to produce automatic movements. some claim bulova did, but I haven't seen compelling evidence to support any idea other than they assembled automatic movements made by the swiss.
interesting. well, to me and all of the 4 people who frequent this particular board who like US made watches. Bruce is, of course, an expert on whose words I would easily rely.
Elgin produced 4 auto calibers: 607, 618, 760, 761. the first two were bumpers, the second two, full rotor.
they were entirely made in the US.
hamilton did not manufacture an auto. eventually, they imported swiss auto movements. interesting factoid- they seemed to have imported eternamatic movements before the ball bearing technology was made available to ETA. I have no hard figures for this, just observation.
but hamilton was placing their eggs in a substantially different basket during this time- the electrics.
As a Hamilton collector myself, that is a very interesting factoid. I know that Hamilton used ETA, Certina and of course the famous Buren micro rotor auto movements. At the time I'm sure they thought they were betting on the right horse, but focusing on electronics rather than modern, mechanical movements (like the Swiss were doing) probably hastened their demise. Their in-house manual wind movements, while extremely high quality, were quite old-fashioned by the 1950s.
They also used Kurth Freres (Certina) movements in some of their self-wind models. The movement shown is marked Certina, but this movement was marked Hamilton 661 when they used it.
