This is how my mind operates. I casually troll auction sites and vintage online retailers. I am committed to not buying anything. I see a 1940’s military style watch from a brand that I don’t know. It is a 1940’s automatic so I assume a Felsa or an A. Schild lurks inside. I have been on a bit of a Bidynator kick recently. I begin to research the brand and get the typical dead-end WatchUSeek inquiries that pass for research sometimes. I can trace the company back to two intersecting streets in Baltimore, Maryland where a Baltimore mayor was honored after committing suicide in 1904. I have connections to Maryland and so did this company, Easton.
Curiously, Mikrolisk also lists the Isaac Swope Company of New York as the importer, presumably of the Swiss movement. Swope is a name that I can find, mostly in pocket watch sources as a case maker. However, Swope is a St. Louis, Missouri company. Here is news ripped from the November 30, 1896, St. Louis Dispatch:
Cheap seems to have moved from its original meaning of “good bargain” well before 1896. I am guessing that Swope cases were in fact cheap.
Many Easton watches also bore the name “Seeland” on their casebacks or movements. Frederick Seeland was the North American distributor of IWC in the 19th Century and founded his own company to import less expensive watches. Seeland and Invicta are intertwined. It is difficult by the 20th Century to clearly see who owns whom. When I see Seeland, I think Invicta. I don’t think “cheap”, but maybe I should.
So, back to cheap old Isaac Swope. I have no idea how long that company or company name persisted. What is interesting about Swope is his family. He had two sons Gerald and Herbert Bayard Swope. Let’s take Herbert first.
Herbert was the youngest of four. He became a journalist and spent most of his career at the New York World where he became one of those loosely known as the Algonquin Round Table. He became the first ever recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Reporting for a series of articles that he wrote in 1917 about the German Empire. He would win two additional Pulitzer Prizes. He is credited with coining the term “Cold War”. He was not the most successful of the Swope boys.
His older brother, Gerald, graduated from MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1895. In 1922 he was named as the President of the General Electric Company, where he would remain for nearly another two decades. During the Depression he served in many Roosevelt Administration posts to aid in economic recovery but is mostly known for his work for the Business Advisory Council of the United States Department of Commerce. Swope won the Legion of Honor (France) and the Order of the Rising Sun (Japan). He had successful children as well. His daughter Henrietta was a noted astronomer, and his son John was an award-winning Life photographer who married actress Dorothy McGuire.
(A famous photo by John Swope, presumably controlled by the John Swope Trust)
All of this information is now stuffed into my head because I saw a cheap old watch on eBay. If you have read this far it is there for you too.
(The photograph at the beginning is of Baltimore after the Fire of 1904.)
The Escapement Room 