Standardization in the Watch Industry…or the intentional lack thereof

Written By Stephen Heverley

Standardization and the Industrial Revolution

The late 19th and early 20th centuries transformed manufacturing from a craft practiced by individual artisans into a coordinated industrial system, and standardization was the thread that held this system together. Before this era, parts for machines, tools, and even everyday goods like screws or gun components were typically handmade to fit one specific device, with no guarantee that a replacement part from a different workshop would fit at all. As factories grew larger and production scaled up, this lack of uniformity became a serious bottleneck. Standardization solved this problem by establishing common measurements, tolerances, and specifications that allowed components to be manufactured independently yet still fit together reliably.

One of the earliest and most influential examples was the development of interchangeable parts, pioneered in firearms manufacturing in the United States. Companies like Colt and later the Springfield Armory refined techniques so that rifle components could be produced to precise specifications and swapped between different units without custom fitting. This approach, often called the "American System of Manufacturing," spread from weapons production into sewing machines, bicycles, and eventually automobiles. It meant that a broken part no longer required a skilled machinist to hand-craft a replacement; instead, a stock part could simply be pulled from inventory and installed.

Standardization also reshaped the assembly line itself. Henry Ford's moving assembly line for the Model T, introduced in 1913, depended entirely on standardized parts and standardized worker tasks. Each worker performed a single repetitive operation on identical components, and the predictability of the parts made the speed and efficiency of the line possible. Without standardized components, an assembly line would grind to a halt every time a part needed adjustment or rework. This model of production dramatically lowered costs and made goods like automobiles affordable to a much broader segment of the population, fueling consumer demand and economic growth.

Beyond individual factories, standardization enabled entire industries and infrastructures to interconnect. Railroads are a striking example: differing track gauges between competing rail companies had made it impossible to run a single train across networks owned by different operators. The adoption of a standard gauge in the United States and elsewhere allowed a truly national rail system to emerge, dramatically increasing the speed and efficiency of moving goods and raw materials. Similarly, standardized units of measurement, screw threads, and electrical specifications allowed manufacturers across regions and even countries to build compatible products, opening the door to national and international trade on a scale that had not previously been possible.

Standardization additionally supported the professionalization of engineering and management during this period. Organizations such as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers began publishing formal standards for materials, testing, and design, replacing ad hoc craft knowledge with codified, repeatable practices. This gave rise to scientific management principles, most notably those advanced by Frederick Winslow Taylor, which sought to standardize not just physical components but human labor processes themselves, breaking tasks into measurable, optimized steps.

In sum, standardization was not a minor technical detail of the Industrial Revolution but one of its central organizing principles. It made mass production possible, turned regional industries into national and global networks, and reshaped how humans thought about labor, precision, and efficiency. The legacy of this shift is still visible today in everything from the shape of a screw thread to the width of a railroad track, underscoring how deeply standardization reordered the physical and economic world during this transformative period.

The Swiss Watch Industry: A Notable Holdout

While American manufacturing embraced interchangeable parts and centralized factory production in the late 19th century, the Swiss watch industry took a strikingly different path, one that preserved craft fragmentation long after other industries had consolidated. Swiss watchmaking had historically relied on établissage, a system in which small, dispersed workshops each specialized in a narrow task, and this decentralized structure persisted well after Frédéric Japy introduced the "ébauche" concept in the late 18th century: prefabricated movement blanks that other artisans would finish and assemble. Rather than triggering true standardization, this system gave rise to a landscape of dozens of independent ébauche manufacturers, each producing movement blanks to their own specifications rather than to any shared industry standard. As a result, an ébauche made by one manufacturer for one watch brand's model would typically not fit or interchange with a movement made by a competing manufacturer, even for a broadly similar watch.

It took a genuine external threat, not internal reform, to push Swiss watchmaking toward any coordination at all. In the 1870s, American factories began mass-producing mechanical watches using machined, interchangeable parts, organized as vertically integrated firms capable of high-volume output; this competitive shock caused Swiss watch exports to the United States to collapse from over 18 million francs in 1872 to under 4 million francs by 1877-1878. Longines engineer Jacques David toured American watch factories and returned urging the Swiss industry to "wake up" to this organizational advantage. Even so, change came slowly and unevenly: as historian François Jequier observed, new mass-production methods did not replace the old craft system but instead operated alongside it, producing what he called an "extraordinary heterogeneity" across the industry. Prestige houses such as Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin went further, deliberately refusing to standardize on mass-produced blanks at all, treating bespoke, non-interchangeable movements as a mark of luxury rather than a limitation to be engineered away.

The first real steps toward standardization came not from engineering societies but from industry cartels formed to survive economic crises. In 1926, three of the largest movement makers, Schild SA, Fabrique d'Horlogerie de Fontainemelon, and A. Michel SA, formed the holding company Ébauches SA, which fixed prices among its members and began standardizing the specifications of certain movement parts to cut costs. Ébauches SA spent the following decades buying out smaller "dissident" ébauche manufacturers who refused to join the cartel, and by 1951 it had absorbed as many as 75 separate movement makers. In 1934, the Swiss government formalized this cartelization further by enacting the Statut horloger, a federal law regulating the export of movement blanks and components. Yet even these mergers were closer to industry consolidation than to true cross-brand standardization; each absorbed manufacturer, such as Valjoux, Unitas, Peseux, or the movement operation that eventually became ETA, continued largely producing its own distinct calibers rather than converging on shared, interchangeable designs across brands.

Real parts-level standardization across multiple brands did not arrive until the industry's largest conglomerate took shape amid an existential crisis. During the 1970s "quartz crisis," inexpensive, highly accurate quartz watches from Japanese manufacturers devastated the Swiss industry, and Swiss watchmaking employment fell from more than 80,000 workers in the early 1970s to roughly 20,000 by the mid-1980s. In 1983, at the recommendation of consultant Nicolas G. Hayek, the two largest and financially troubled Swiss watch groups, ASUAG (which controlled most ébauche manufacturers) and SSIH (which owned brands like Omega and Tissot), merged to form SMH, later renamed The Swatch Group in 1998. Under this single corporate umbrella, component production across previously independent and competing brands was centralized and rationalized for the first time, with ETA emerging as a unified movement supplier producing standardized calibers used across many different Swatch Group brands. It was this large-scale corporate consolidation, decades after standardization had already reordered other industries, that finally brought genuine cross-brand parts standardization to an industry that had spent nearly two centuries resisting it.

From a working watchmaker's perspective, this legacy of non-standardization is felt most acutely in restoration and heirloom preservation. Most manufacturers, even today, will only stock and sell parts for a given model for roughly 20 to 30 years before discontinuing them, and how long a model remains supported often depends heavily on its original commercial popularity, a dynamic that also feeds directly into the collector's market, where scarcity and eventual parts obsolescence tend to drive up later desirability and value. When a watchmaker cannot source new, new-old-stock, or even used parts for a watch that is 50 years old or older, despite that watch still being common, the only remaining option is to fabricate the missing part from scratch, almost always without access to the original manufacturer's specifications. This kind of ground-up part fabrication is typically the most demanding and time-consuming aspect of the trade, and it is one of the central reasons watch repair and restoration estimates can look so steep at first glance. The next time a watchmaker's quote seems outrageous, it's worth remembering that the number rarely comes with the full context behind it, and that context is, more often than not, this very history of an industry that never standardized its parts.

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Stephen Heverley