”IT'S WALTHAM WATCH TIME - TIME FOR AMERICANS.”

In 1944 and 1945, a remarkable series of national broadcasts originated right from the Waltham Watch Company's factory on Crescent Street. Former Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles (right) delivered audio essays on World War II and his vision for post-war international order.

Just like our trove of correspondence between Waltham Watch and Nikola Tesla, the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation’s collection includes original, annotated scripts from Welles's programs.

And aside from the general historical nature of the talks, we love the ad-reads for Waltham Watch products that are included:

”IT'S WALTHAM WATCH TIME - TIME FOR AMERICANS.”
What will the watch of the future be like? The same watch we've always known?

”Or, a better watch?

”These questions are being answered this very minute at Waltham, where behind long rows of lighted windows in the Waltham Watch Company, hundreds of skilled craftsmen - men who have devoted their lives; men whose fathers devoted their lives before them - bend over delicate instruments and with sensitive fingers and precision tools of finest steel, fashion the most perfect time-measuring devices used in this war.

”No watches for civilians now, but once the war is won, and its lessons learned, all the skill and craftsmanship which created Waltham's position as FIRST AMERICAN WATCH will be turned to the pursuits of peace...”

Welles saw early on that true peace required rules-based international standards rather than sheer force, an argument that remains as relevant today as it was from a studio on the Charles River 80 years ago.

On the Danger of "Might Makes Right" and Polarized Spheres of Influence

"From the purely practical standpoint, it is perfectly clear... that if every one of the great powers, simply because it is strong enough to do so, decides to intervene either by diplomatic means, or through the use of force... to bring about the establishment there of the kind of government it wants, international anarchy will be the result."

A Blueprint for Durable Peace Through Self-Determination

"I cannot conceive of any permanently stable or peaceful world in which sovereign peoples are not permitted freely to determine their own destinies within the limitations of international conduct fixed by an International Organization."

Sumner Welles had been forced out of the State Department in late 1943 by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who used an FBI file on Welles’s personal life, to force his resignation - a prelude to the so-called 'Lavender Scare,' when government officials perceived to be gay were ruthlessly purged.

Undeterred, Welles took his vision for post-war international order directly to the public. He was instrumental in the creation of the United Nations.

Our amazing former volunteer, Draken Garfinkel, tracked down digitized copies of the original broadcasts through the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Check out the audio clip below to hear Sumner Welles broadcasting from Waltham!

This is the fun part of public history.

"Mr. Tesla is not doing anything to give us encouragement, and I guess as far as Tesla patent speedometer business is concerned, we are through.”

Waltham Watch Company General Manager I. E. Boucher wrote that to inventor Stead Asquith on December 3, 1928.

Boucher's frustration with Nikola Tesla over royalty payments boiled over. For over a year, Boucher tried to convince Tesla that the premiums they had to pay him (rightly, according to their licensing agreement made a decade earlier) were too high to keep their speedometers competitive.

In our new exhibition, "Nikola Tesla: The Speed of Innovation," Boucher's was one of the most prominent and colorful voices in the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation's archive.

Boucher and Waltham Watch President Frederic C. Dumaine took control of the company in 1923 after a major reorganization. They cut costs, weathered the "Monster Strike" of 1924, and slowly returned the operation to profitability.

And Mr. Tesla's design was not off-limits.

Before coming to Waltham, Boucher had a successful stint at the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Manchester, NH. He worked his way from being a "truck boy" in the Amoskeag Dye House (Print Works) in 1902 to his leadership of one of the most important manufacturing sites in the US.

I got a sense of his no-nonsense managerial leadership through his correspondence with Tesla and Asquith, though, surprisingly, images of Boucher were hard to find.

But research would yield a much more exciting lead - someone with living memory of I. E. Boucher!

Through a series of twists, we found ourselves face-to-face with Boucher's grandson here at the Museum, holding a photo album, several related items, and lots of memories. He had lived with his grandfather for the early part of his childhood. Boucher's grandson was accompanied by his wife and daughter, all three visiting our museum for the first time.

This image is one of our favorites from that album. Boucher, the taller man at center, is looking askance at a fellow executive, while a US military officer holds a small component, underscoring the importance of defense contracts that Waltham had to bolster its precision instrumentation sales.

Seeing Boucher's face, we can easily imagine him writing to Asquith on September 15, 1928:

“The situation on speedometers is growing worse with us, and it appears now it is possible we may have to give up the business entirely. Mr. Tesla has not been willing to listen to reason. He would not consider selling his patent, nor would he reduce his royalty, and we can no longer compete.”

In return, we really enjoyed sharing with Boucher's descendants the pivotal role he played in the company's relationship with Tesla.

This is the fun part of public history.

*And are you like me and want to know everything about the woman turned from her assembly line station to look straight into the camera?

Photo courtesy of Edmond Boucher Simmons, grandson of I. E. Boucher

"American Waltham Watches Go All Over The World"

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Within our Waltham Watch Company collection is a family of 140+ beautiful, hand painted glass positives showing Waltham Watch Company advertising imagery, circa 1900-1910.

American pocket watches were among the first consumer goods sold in Japan after the Meiji Restoration, and Waltham Watch was at the vanguard. For several decades of the 19th century, Waltham dominated the market for precision machining and mass-produced a huge array of watches and clocks, including items for international markets.

In our storage area, we've been sorting a box of several dozen glass positives from the "American Waltham Watches Go All Over The World" campaign, which features wild and weird images of anthropomorphic watches and clocks in scenes we can't even begin to explain.

Many of them feature Asian, specifically Japanese, motifs.

There's a strong "Alice in Wonderland" vibe to most of them, and of course, a number of problematic depictions of foreign figures.

One of the slides had a substantial amount of writing, as well as the Waltham Watch eagle. Here's what we've found out about it.

The translation:
“The Waltham watch you own is clearly and certainly stamped on the back of the watch with the words ‘The Best.’ Behind this guarantee, which is assured in perpetuity, stands the world’s largest factory, making the finest of timepieces: the American Waltham watch.”

A couple of notes on the period flavor: the text uses pre-war orthography (確實 for 確実, 國 for 国, the old katakana ヰ-era conventions), consistent with a circa 1900 to 1910s dating. “貴下” (kika) is a formal second-person address, roughly “your esteemed self.” The watch face in the image reads "WALTHAM" and features a classic small-seconds subdial at 6.

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Pocket watches became iconic markers of the Westernization movement, in tandem with industrialization throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Hoshimi Uchida's article, “The Spread of Timepieces in the Meiji Period,” in Japan Review, no. 14 (2002):

"Around the beginning of the twentieth century, when imported timepieces still held most of the market, it was commonly said that 'high-range watches are gold, middle-range watches are silver, and 100 percent-nickel mechanisms are not so far off. But nickel is not so expensive—maybe two yen. So it’s not the mechanism or the appearance, but wearing a watch worth ten yen or more that will be the real value people will get from their watches.” Domestic pocket watches first aimed for the general public, and then aimed higher with gold and silver versions of their “Excellent,” an imitation of the U.S. Waltham watches, thereby succeeding in increasing their sales.

There is no doubt that this kind of inexpensive pocket watch increased the size of the domestic market, just as grandfather clocks had. Behind the spread of timepieces as the first Western consumer durable in Meiji period Japan was the entrepreneurship of Japanese makers aiming at taking the place of imported timepieces in the market."

And,

"Even people without watches began paying closer attention to the time, using public clocks. Spread of timepieces, the first Western consumer durable, gradually changed the sensibility of the average Japanese with respect to time over the course of the Meiji period. What made possible such changes in the social system were the supply of the hardware, at first imported and then domestically produced, and the formation of a market."

And just WHO was Stew Perry?

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As part of International Museums Weekend, on Saturday, June 20, 2026, amateur radio operators Eric Pfeifer (NJUR) and Shannon Gibney (KC10HT) will operate the historic W1BB callsign from the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation in Waltham, Massachusetts. This event will honor the legacy of Mr. Stew Perry, W1BB “Mr. 160.”

As Charles River Museum Executive Director, Bob Perry, explains:

"My grandfather, Stewart “Stew” Perry, was a registered professional engineer by day, but a trailblazing, life-long amateur radio operator, or “ham,” by night. His call sign was W1BB.

Stew Perry was born in 1904. Family legend has it that he was inspired to build his first transmitter, a spark-gap set, after overhearing radio traffic about the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.

W1BB was widely celebrated for his pioneering work in and mastery of the “top band” or “gentleman’s band,” the 160-meter band of radio frequencies allocated to amateurs. Some of that success was enabled by his convincing his town of Winthrop, Massachusetts, to allow him to use the Point Shirley water tower as the support for his massive antenna rig. That water tower, for many years now painted red, white, and blue, remains a prominent landmark today."

Amateur radio has played an important role in communication history throughout the 20th Century and into the present day. We’re pleased that we can present this fun and familial event as part of our programming!

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Charles River Museum Executive Director Bob Perry proudly holds his grandfather Stew's scrapbook of radio awards and memorabilia.

Francis Cabot Lowell, Rum Magnate

by Stephen Guerriero, Director of Education

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Francis Cabot Lowell is famous for founding the Boston Manufacturing Company and the Waltham-Lowell System, which helped scale the American Industrial Revolution. But, did you know he was a major Boston rum distiller?

The BMC's mill was built in 1814 to process raw cotton into finished cloth under one roof, powered by the Charles River, and operated by the Mill Girls.

But a decade before he revolutionized textiles, Lowell was trying to revolutionize… rum.

A particular area of my research at the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation has been a deep dive into a fascinating, overlooked chapter of his career, his time as proprietor of the largest distillery in Boston.

Take a look at this digitized advertisement from "The Repertory," published September 19, 1806. It announces the impending auction of a "Distil House for sale" at the corner of Hancock and Belknap (now Joy) Streets.

That site was part of a large plot of land that once belonged to the Lechmere family of Tories who fled during the Revolution. Lowell bought it from another famous Bostonian, Mungo Mackay, in 1801.

Lowell and his partners, Uriah Cotting and Henry Jackson, boldly claimed the distillery was "the largest in the United States."

The sheer scale of the operation was staggering for the early 19th century:

🥃 Producing 100 hogsheads of rum per week (roughly 327,000 gallons a year)

🥃 It housed 80 liquor cisterns holding upwards of 200,000 gallons

🥃 It featured a dedicated aqueduct network connected to a well on Chamber Street to supply the immense amount of water needed for cooling

What truly fascinates me as an educator isn't just the size of the distillery, it's Lowell's obsessive engineering innovation.

Francis Cabot Lowell wasn't just a passive investor. The ad boasts a "patent and exclusive right which makes a great saving of fuel" and reduces labor costs.

Archival letters at the Massachusetts Historical Society show Lowell fiercely iterating on these still designs, corresponding with inventors such as Alexander Anderson in Philadelphia, buying precision-measurement hydrometers from Liverpool, and studying Scottish distillation techniques.

Ultimately, Lowell misjudged the long-term rum market, and the partnership dissolved in 1806. Americans started getting into locally produced whiskey, while the gin craze was starting in the UK.

The distillery was his industrial testing ground.

The iterative problem-solving, patent negotiations, and relentless drive for efficiency he developed with rum are the exact intellectual habits that allowed him to reverse-engineer the power loom at the BMC mill a decade later.

Francis Cabot Lowell

The Machines That Never Stop

It never ceases to amaze us how much history informs our present moment, and yet so few are aware of it. Consider how Big Tech bosses speak in almost religious or romantic terms about the AI technology they're building. It can be strange or jarring, but it's definitely not new.

Last week, while digging through the Museum archives, our Director of Education, Steve Guerriero, pulled out this gem of a booklet, and it is a great example of what we mean. Published in the first decade of the 20th century, this marked a high-water mark of the Waltham Watch Company, the first in the world to perfect precision machining at a factory scale. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and John Jacob Astor were all owners of pocket watches made at Waltham's plant.

In 1896, an engineer named E.A. Marsh published his own account of the innovative machines developed and deployed at the Waltham Watch factory, particularly in the 1890s. Titled "Watches by Automatic Machinery at Waltham," the book was an indicator of a kind of self-awareness that those working with this new technology were doing something really important. The machines took what had been a jeweler's handicraft and made it something that could be done by increasingly complex machines, using interchangeable parts and assembly lines of specialized workers.

But this 1907 pamphlet by J. Hopkins of Waltham Watch is next level.

The title evokes some of the discourse heard now around AI: "The Machines That Never Stop: An American Romance."

A combination of both celebratory innovation bordering on hyperbole and a sense of inevitability and unstoppable progress.

But it's the preface of the booklet that really goes off:

THE MACHINES THAT NEVER STOP: An American Romance--How Yankees Worked The Most Difficult Manufacturing Puzzle In The World

'A just pride in what you really can honestly do yourself.' -Ruskin

"You know how to tell a man's pride. Ask him what he wants to leave his son.
The Oriental's idea is a good living. He would answer: 'My guarded palace, slaves, women, jewels.'

”The European is proudest of good position. He would answer: 'My title, estates to support it, honors in politics or art.'

”But the significant pioneer American thinks most of good will, because over here it is hardest to get. He would say: 'I want my boy to have my business, and enough to run it and the reputation my product has made.'

”THE FINEST LEGACY IN THE WORLD

”So the sun gets not ease, or vanity, but responsibility, the finest legacy there is.

”Elihu Root once spoke of 'that priceless solace of old age, the respect and affection of the community that makes up one's world.'

”Right. 'The Almighty Dollar' is not really as much an end as a means. The American industrial impulse, finally analyzed, is not to make money; it is to 'make good.' it is the pioneer passion to conquer prejudice, work, mechanical marvels, 'do it first,' and thereby earn the value of respect for a trademark or a name."

A lot to think about.

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We are proud to now be part of this wonderful, FREE platform that allows app users a taste of the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation experience. And Museum Visitors using the app have access to an enhanced digital experience, including audio, video, and expanded content beyond what we have on site.

When you visit us next, look for QR codes placed throughout the Museum that link to the Bloomberg Connects app and our content. These are placed where we have provided enhanced content, both audio and video, to add to your enjoyment and learning.

And we'll be expanding these experiences over time to always improve your Visitor experience and make us a better Charles River Museum!