LA TIMES ARTICLE
Daniel Miller Nov. 14, 2019
One man’s 1,648-page quest to preserve an American watch company’s history
First, there’s the heft: 24.5 pounds.
Then, there’s the size: 1,648 pages.
But, really, it’s the topic of this five-volume book set that elicits the biggest surprise: the Illinois Watch Co.
Presidents, wars, social movements — few, if any, have prompted histories of this depth.
Yet Fredric J. Friedberg devoted a decade of his life to writing “The Illinois Watch & Its Hamilton Years,” a history of a defunct company that, odds are, you’ve never heard of before.
Though not a household name like Rolex, Illinois was once at the vanguard of the vibrant American watchmaking industry, crafting Art Deco-styled timepieces that rivaled the best from Switzerland in both accuracy and artistry.
Watch collector Fredric J. Friedberg focused his efforts on the Illinois Watch Co. after being captivated by the brand’s Art Deco designs.(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Fredric J. Friedberg, a retired attorney, spent a decade writing an in-depth history of the Illinois Watch Co., which closed nearly 90 years ago. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Friedberg can’t explain why he became fixated on vintage watches. But even as a child, he was a collector of things. Marbles. Popsicle sticks. Pennies from 1943 that were made with steel due to a World War II-era copper shortage.“I have no idea why I was doing it,” he said. In 1988, Friedberg, then an attorney in his mid-40s, found a new thing to collect. He was in Washington, D.C., on business, and during a stroll down Wisconsin Avenue, a vintage watch shop caught his eye. “I didn’t know stores like this existed. I was shocked,” he said.
Friedberg went in without intending to make a purchase, but, of course, did just that, picking up a delicate, rectangular model made by Girard-Perregaux in the 1940s.“It felt like I had found heaven,” he said.
“I mean, I just had an affinity for it,” he said. But McDowell has some ideas about the enduring allure of wristwatches.“Look, none of us need watches, we have the iPhone,” said McDowell, who befriended Friedberg around 2012. “It’s about telling a story. A watch tells the rest of the world who you are. And Illinois watches really are as good as anything made in Europe. These are under the radar. You feel a little bit special that you know something about them.”Unlike a mobile phone or a battery-powered quartz watch, mechanical timepieces are powered by a movement composed of gears, wheels, levers and springs. It can seem almost like alchemy — that simply winding a watch can bring to life its innards, allowing for something as ephemeral as the passage of time to be memorialized. Anachronistic? Perhaps. But it’s also romantic to some. For Friedberg, though, it was more about the hunt, especially in the beginning. He just kept buying watches. But Friedberg also had a young family and a big mortgage.“I was afraid I’d put my family in the poorhouse because every time I went by an antique store I’d go in and buy watches,” he said. “I’d come home and I’d have a pile of crap, and they weren’t working and … and I said, ‘This is insane.’”
The Illinois Watch Co. was started in 1870, co-founded by industrialist John Whitfield Bunn, who had been a close friend of Abraham Lincoln. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
The Illinois Watch Co. was Friedberg’s salvation. Realizing he needed to narrow his focus, Friedberg homed in on the company’s wristwatches, their Art Deco elegance captivating him.
“No one touched Art Deco design like Illinois,” he said. “Plus it was an incredible story about American manufacturing, entrepreneurship, and enterprise in this country.”
The Springfield, Ill., company was started in 1870, co-founded by industrialist John Whitfield Bunn, who had been a close friend of Abraham Lincoln. The company made its name turning out especially precise pocket watches that were used by railroads to keep accurate time, making train travel safer.
Among the watches in Fredric J. Friedberg’s collection of Illinois Watch Co. timepieces is a Jolly Roger model from 1929. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
The factory that turned out Illinois’ precision instruments was a Gilded Age marvel. In a stroke of industrial innovation often overlooked amid praise for Henry Ford’s later accomplishments, the company’s timepieces were made on assembly lines.
John Cote, a member of the National Assn. of Watch & Clock Collectors’ board of directors, said the company’s standardized approach, especially when compared to the largely hand-made pieces coming out of Switzerland at the time, is an important example of American ingenuity.
“The American system of manufacturing things, it prevailed over the British and the Swiss, who were the watchmakers of the 1700s, 1800s and up to about the 1850s, when America started taking it over,” said Cote, an Illinois expert.
Illinois hit its stride during the boom years after World War I. Following the war, wristwatches became popular among men, in part because soldiers had grown accustomed to strapping pocket watches to their arms to more easily tell the time on the battlefield. According to Cote, during the 1920s, Illinois was the third-biggest American watch company by production volume, trailing only Elgin and Waltham.
Friedberg shows off one of his wristwatches, a Skyway model made by the Illinois Watch Co. in 1930. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
It’s an inspiring era for modern American watchmakers including Cameron Weiss, who founded his eponymous Torrance-based watch brand in 2013.
“The inspiration for Weiss Watch Co. really lies with companies like Waltham, Elgin and Illinois,” Weiss said. “They were supplying all of America and many other countries with watches. Before that, watches were really only for the wealthiest of individuals who could afford a handmade item.”
But for Illinois, and later the rest of the American watchmaking industry, the boom years would soon end.
After its purchase by rival Hamilton in 1928, Illinois was buffeted by a series of changes and ultimately shut down during the Great Depression. Or, as Friedberg writes, the company’s “new corporate parent, faced with life-and-death choices, elected to allow only one watch operation to survive in the face of the most tumultuous economic conditions in the history of the United States.”
And by the end of the 1960s, Hamilton, Elgin, and Waltham had all ceased operating as American companies, either shuttering or selling to the Swiss.
While Illinois’ story ended on a melancholy note, Friedberg reckoned it made for a great tale.
Before “The Illinois Watch & Its Hamilton Years,” there was an opening act. In 2004, Friedberg released “The Illinois Watch: The Life and Times of a Great American Watch Company.”
But he wasn’t satisfied with the book, which checks in at a comparably scant 272 pages. He began to fixate on the things he left out of the history, and friends noticed.
Television producer Greg Hart recalled visiting Friedberg’s home after the book’s release.
“I saw all of his material from the first book — he had boxes and boxes of things,” Hart said. “He said, ‘Look at all the stuff that never made it into my book. It’s been driving me crazy.’ I don’t think he could’ve died a happy man unless he told this story.”
To write his history of the Illinois Watch Co., Friedberg combed through the company’s corporate minutes, patent applications, old advertisements, and more. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
So Friedberg started anew in 2008. By then, he was nearly two decades into his career as general counsel at Toshiba America Medical Systems. Eventually, Friedberg served as chairman of that company and two related ones headquartered in Chicago and in Edinburgh, Scotland. Regular travel to those locales — he visited Edinburgh at least once a month for eight years — afforded an opportunity to write. He always traveled with a hard copy of a chapter in progress.
“I never watched movies, but I would sip wine and work on the book,” he said. “I wasn’t good at sleeping on planes anyway.”
Friedberg worked his way through a trove of material: corporate minutes, patent applications, old advertisements, and more.
But his meticulous approach could be a burden.
“There were times where he said, ‘How am I ever going to get this done?’” Hart said. “He took on a project that was never attempted in the history of the brand. I said, ‘Fred, how does a mouse eat an elephant? One bite at a time.’”
“The Illinois Watch & Its Hamilton Years” was released by Schiffer Publishing in May 2018. The $295 five-volume set is both sumptuous and encyclopedic, its in-depth history of the brand supplemented by a guide featuring every wristwatch model made by the company and essays from collectors, among other features. Volume Five even includes a 750-question quiz, and Friedberg writes that readers can email him if they “get stuck on any question.”
Schiffer Publishing printed about 1,000 copies, and about 500 have been sold so far. Among the buyers have been a handful of notable institutions and organizations: The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, the Abraham Lincoln Research Library and the National Assn. of Watch and Clock Collectors.
“The Illinois Watch & Its Hamilton Years” clocks in at 24.5 pounds and 1,648 pages. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
That’s a point of pride for Friedberg, and the book set also has won praise from a notable group: people in the family tree of Bunn, the company’s co-founder.
“We admire him tremendously,” said Andrew Taylor Call, a Bunn great-great-great grandnephew. “I would say in absolute faith that Fredric Friedberg knows more about the Illinois Watch Co. than anyone alive today.”
::
The decades were laid out in front of Friedberg on the kitchen table of his Irvine home.
More than 200 wristwatches in all, they told the story of 30-plus years spent buying, selling, cataloging, researching, writing, and publishing.
Friedberg delighted in canvassing the array, which he keeps at a bank and brought home for a recent interview. He bobbed around the table as his wife, Joy, cooked vegan hamburgers she insisted Times journalists try (verdict: surprisingly meaty).
While Friedberg fussed over the watches, Joy said she has long known that he would “dedicate himself to whatever he gets into.” But five volumes?
“I don’t think I could’ve seen that far,” she said.
Still, she was reluctant to call her husband’s work an obsession.
“Maybe to him it’s an obsession,” she said. “To me, it’s like — there are people who have hobbies and people who have avocations. This is an avocation.”
The table glittered and flared as sunlight strafed it through the kitchen windows. Every so often, Friedberg would snatch up a rare piece to explain its provenance.
One of them was a 1928 Illinois Consul given by inmates of Michigan’s Marquette Branch Prison to the prison doctor on the occasion of his retirement. The solid white gold watch, which has been dubbed the “Convict Consul,” may have been a gift from imprisoned members of the Purple Gang, an infamous group that terrorized Detroit, Friedberg said.
Among the assemblage was the one that started it all: the Girard-Perregaux he bought in 1988. A paper label affixed to it read “#1.”
Friedberg has numbered all the watches that have passed through his hands. No. 3,729, No. 3,810 and No. 4,779 gleamed alongside dozens of others. There were gaps in the numbers, owing to those he has relinquished, some as part of an ongoing unburdening.
Friedberg began winnowing his collection a few years ago. After his sons made clear they were not interested in his watches, he moved to sell off the bulk of them. His new book set has made it easier.
“If I want to see them I can go open the book,” he said. “I don’t have to possess them. I can’t be selfish. I want it to go into the hands of someone who will appreciate it.”
But McDowell doubted Friedberg will ever really stop collecting.
“No, I don’t believe it — he’s just giving you a bit of Shinola there,” said McDowell, laughing. “Of course, he’s satisfied at having completed a task that took five times longer than he thought it would. But I happen to know there is a watch that he’s trying to get.”
When pressed, Friedberg conceded he isn’t quite done. When asked about his next purchase, he wouldn’t say much, but he knows one thing: it’ll be No. 4,989.
Hodinkee Article
Recommended Reading Chronicling The History Of A Great American Watch Company
One man’s five-volume quest to document the Illinois Watch Company.
The assiduous accumulation and sharing of arcane information have followed the watch hobby for as long as there have been collectors. But if you scan the internet to learn about specific brands, you’ll likely encounter comprehensive, reference-grade content about extant Swiss makers. This is why I sat up a bit when I saw a recent Los Angeles Times article by Hodinkee Radio alumnus Daniel Miller. Miller’s Nov. 14 article and the accompanying video tell the story of watch collector Frederic J. Friedberg and his recently completed 1,648-page history of the Illinois Watch Company.
Friedberg’s Illinois Watch Jolly Roger model from 1929. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times
A retired attorney who once owned more than 700 Illinois watches and became its leading expert, Friedberg is the author of The Illinois Watch Company And Its Hamilton Years, a horological opus penned over the course of a decade while pursuing a legal and corporate career. Friedberg, who says he could never sleep on planes, whiled away time on transatlantic business flights working on chapters from the book.
Just some of Frederic J. Friedberg’s collection. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Friedberg’s interest in vintage watches began with the purchase of a 1940s Girard-Perregaux from a shop in Washington, D.C. Before long, the collecting bug bit, and he began accumulating watches. The decision to collect Illinois arose from an interest in Americana and discovering the fine quality with which Illinois watches were made. He also knew that he had to impose some sort of limit on the watches he chased. “I was afraid I’d put my family in the poorhouse because every time I went by an antique store I’d go in and buy watches,” he told Miller. Friedberg ended up going deep down the rabbit hole, emerging as the expert on a watch company that few collectors vie for today, but that nonetheless played an outsize role in America’s watch industry during its height.
Top image by Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times.
NAWCC Profile in Time Interview
NAWCC Profile in Time Interview
FORTUNE MAGAZINE ARTICLE
When American Watches Rivaled the Swiss
It is not easy for addicts to write objectively about their dealers. But Fred Friedberg is essential to any story about my “drug of choice” – vintage Illinois watches from the 1920s and 1930s.
Fred has bought and sold thousands of these iconic beauties over the years, including several dozen to me in the past decade. Other collectors include actor Malcolm McDowell and television producer Greg Hart.
I thought his own obsession was sated in 2004 when he wrote The Illinois Watch: The Life and Times of a Great American Watch Company. He was only getting started and this month he has published a five-volume, 1600-page set, The Illinois Watch & Its Hamilton Years: The Finale of a Great American Watch Company.
Looking at today’s luxury watch market, dominated by European manufacturers such as Patek Philippe, Rolex, and Omega, it is easy to forget there was a time when American manufacturers rivaled the Europeans. Cincinnati’s Gruen and Geneva’s Rolex both bought their movements from the same source, Jean Aegler. Hamilton, based in Lancaster, Pa., introduced an art deco line, with watches costing as much as $125. Elgin, Waltham, and Bulova also produced quality watches.
The Illinois watch, however, was in a league of its own. Founded in 1870 in Springfield, Illinois, the company produced America’s most interesting art nouveau, art deco, and pre-modern watches from 1919 through the 1930s, when Hamilton, which had bought the brand in 1928, stopped producing them. During those years, Illinois produced more than 180 men’s and women’s models, many with multiple case and dial variations.
Friedberg, 73, researched and wrote his books in Irvine, California while serving as general counsel and a top executive at Toshiba America Medical Systems Corp. He began collecting watches himself in 1988 after seeing some for sale in small shops in Washington, DC, and in New York.
Friedberg’s five-volume opus is remarkable. In addition to including 1,800 images of Illinois watches, he lists over 24 pages of movement serial numbers and other dates.
Signed copies of the box set can be bought for $175 on Friedberg’s website. Fred says all proceeds will go to charity. His site also lists more than 100 watches for sale, with prices ranging from $250 to $7,000.
Norman Pearlstine is executive editor of the Los Angeles Times. He was formerly chief content officer of Time Inc. and Bloomberg LP.
ANTIQUARIAN HOROLOGY JOURNAL REVIEW
THE ILLINOIS WATCH AND ITS HAMILTON YEARS
First Edition 2018. Boxed set of five hardbound volumes, titled as below. Schiffer Publishing, Atglen, PA (USA). 23x30x17cm, total 1648 pages. Weight 10.4 kg (23 pounds). ISBN 978-0-7643-5371-0. Available through the publisher or through Amazon.com for US$295, or directly from the author at a special price at Illinoiswatches.com.
1. History of the Illinois Watch Company: Currents and Crosscurrents in the American Watch Industry
2. The Illinois Watch
3. The Identification Guides (Part 1): Illinois Men’s Wristwatches
4. The Identification Guides (Part 2): Illinois Ladies’ Wristwatches & Hamilton-Illinois Wristwatches
5. Collecting Illinois
The Illinois Watch Company — initially called the Springfield Watch Co. 1870–1877, then for one year Illinois Springfield — was one of the pioneers of industrial watchmaking in the USA. It operated independently until 1928, when the Hamilton Watch Company purchased the brand, initially making pocket watches, later also wristwatches, in Springfield IL, but in the Great Depression in 1932 moved all manufacturing to Pennsylvania.
This publication is the result of the lifelong ‘love affair’ of the author with everything connected to the Illinois watch brand and its history. Fourteen years ago Fred Friedberg wrote and published what was until now the standard reference book on the subject: The Illinois Watch: The Life and Times of a Great American Watch Company (Schiffer Publishing 2004, technically out of print, but readily available unused through Amazon. com for around 80$.) The publication under review is the enormously expanded version of the 2004 book, but it is unfair to even compare the two. The 2004 book had 272 pages, the five-volume set has 1648 pages.
The author has dedicated over a decade, virtually his entire retirement life, to search for every bit of information, every image, every fact about every Illinois model ever produced or published about the brand. Of course, the mass of material alone does not make for a superb reference book, but in this case, the material is presented in a well-designed structure.
Volume 1 is a conventional but rather detailed brand history of the Illinois brand.
Chapter 1 introduces the main dramatis personae: the founder John Adams and his successors, John T. Stuart, an Illinois politician and entrepreneur who took over after an early bankruptcy, and the brothers Jacob and John Bunn who made it a successful watch company. Chapter 2 documents in fascinating detail the work environment in watch manufacturing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and Chapters 3 and 4 the acquisition, and later integration, of the brand by Hamilton Watch after 1928. Chapter 5 documents in ‘painful’ detail (115p.) the ‘Ravages of the Great Depression.’
Volume 2, with chapters 6 (Movements), 7 (Dials & Hands), and 8 (Cases), is an encyclopedic documentation of the countless minute details defining any watch brand. Just the visual documentation provided in this volume alone (about 800 images, including photos, documents, blueprints, and textboxes), is a testimony to the singlemindedness with which Fredric Friedberg over decades recorded and collected the thousands of seemingly unimportant documents, facts and images that define any watch brand. This has allowed him to create a priceless resource for watch collectors. But beyond the images, the volume contains e.g. the transcript of a 35-question interview with the author on Illinois’ process of dial fabrication and dial refinishing, or an illustrated primer for spotting ‘redone’ or ‘fake’ dials. Needless to say, the volume also features full-color reproductions of many vintage advertisements for the Illinois brand.
Volume 3 (being the single chapter of the 5-volume set) is the ‘Identification Guide: Illinois Men’s Wristwatches’, the core of the full set. Throughout its history, Illinois used 168 different model names of men’s wristwatches, and these are presented alphabetically from ‘Ace’ to ‘Yorktown’. Each entry has several images of known versions (e.g. different metals or finished), dimensions, and movement variants, and in most cases is supplemented with related advertisements. Rarity information (but no prices) is also included.
Volume 4 is made up of two chapters: The ‘Identification Guide: Illinois Ladies’ Wristwatches’ and the ‘Identification Guide: Hamilton-Illinois Wristwatches’, which follow the pattern of Volume 3.
Volume 5 is, with ‘only’ 227 pages, the slimmest volume of the set. It contains three chapters: 12. Ephemera, Memorabilia, Miscellany, 13. Collecting Illinois, and 14. Test your knowledge, as well as eight appendices: DeLong Escapement; Antitrust Fallout; Illinois movements by date, serial numbers and production quantities; Illinois Watch Co. intellectual property; Illinois private label watches; The ‘Convict Consul’ and the ‘Undertakers Consul’; Some Factory Specification Sheets of Hamilton-Illinois watches; Spec sheet from Ebauches SA for ETA 1256 movement, and finally 289 endnotes (biographical references) and index with around 1500 references.
This reviewer has analyzed and critiqued scores of horological books over the last twenty years but is hard-pressed to find a more comprehensive publication with so much (and much of it new and hereto never published) horological fact as the book under review. Thank you, Fredric Friedberg, for creating it.
Fortunat F. Mueller Maerki
FRATELLO ARTICLE
The Illinois Watch & Its Hamilton Years – a 1648 Pages (and 1800 Images) Book Set
All written by one man – Fredric J. Friedberg
Real dedication by a mono-brand collector. A beautiful 24.5 pounds weighing set of 5 five books on the Illinois Watch Co. was written by one man, Frederic ‘Fred’ J. Friedberg.
Last week, I stumbled across this article in the LA Times. They did a great article on Fred’s work and made me realize I know nothing about Illinois watches. This American brand was creating beautiful art-deco-style timepieces but was put out of business about 90 years ago.
Fred Friedberg and only a part of his collection. Photo by Allen J. Schaben / LA Times
Illinois Watch Co
Friedberg became a watch collector in the late 1980s, which was a pretty unusual hobby back then. He was an attorney in his 40s, and by accident, he bumped into a vintage Girard Perregaux watch. He purchased it, and that’s when it all began. He focused on Illinois wristwatches, as they produced beautiful art-deco watches with a quality that – according to Fred – easily could rival the Swiss-made watches. In 1928, Illinois Watch Co was purchased by Hamilton. Not the Hamilton we know today, but before it became a Swiss brand and part of Swatch Group. Until the late 1960s, Hamilton was American-owned and produced watches in the USA. Anyway, Illinois ceased to exist before that time, and there was only one decent book on them before this new set of five books by Fred.
In 2004, the book “The Illinois Watch: The Life and Times of a Great American Watch Company” was released. Written by, and I kid you not, Fred Friedberg. He decided that the 2004 title didn’t cover the brand adequately enough. In 2008, he started to work on his 1648 pages thick story on “Illinois Watch & Its Hamilton Years: The Finale of a Great American Watch Company.” That’s right, it took him 10 years to write this book and make it happen. 1000 copies were printed, and 500 are still left for sale.
Even if Illinois Watch Co doesn’t ring a bell, I believe that it will surely help you to understand watch collecting even better. And nothing beats a great story anyway. This set of books can be ordered via Fred’s website for just $175.-. That’s a no-brainer for any watch fan out there.
Worn and Wound
The Worn & Wound Podcast Ep. 121: Collecting Illinois Watches with Fred Friedberg
This week, we’re joined by Fred Friedberg, author of The Illinois Watch & Its Hamilton Years. The Illinois Watch Company played an important role in American watchmaking, producing watches at a great scale through the years of the Great Depression, including many classic Art Deco designs. Their history is linked closely to Hamilton, which is a main focus of Fred’s book.
Fred is one of the foremost experts on the history of the Illinois Watch Company, in addition to being a noted collector and author. On the podcast, we discuss the long history of the Illinois Watch Company, what makes these watches interesting to collect, and how the internet has changed our hobby over the decades.
Click here for more information on Fred’s book and to order a copy of your own, and be sure to check out the slider below for a small preview.
This week’s episode is brought to you by the Windup Watch Shop.
To stay on top of all new episodes, you can subscribe to The Worn & Wound Podcast — now available on all major platforms including iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Spotify, and more. You can also find our RSS feed here.
And if you like what you hear, then don’t forget to leave us a review on iTunes.
If there’s a question you want us to answer you can hit us up at info@wornandwound.com, and we’ll put your question in the queue.
NPR
interview
State Journal Registry (SJR)
One Man’s 1,648-Page Quest to Preserve an American Watch Company’s History
Fred Friedberg of Irvine once owned more than 700 Illinois Watch Timepieces Alen J. Shaben (Los Angeles Times / TNS)
SPECTRUM ONE NEWS
Vintage Watch Collector Spent Decade Writing About American Watch Company
Frederic J. Friedberg of Irvine once owned more than 700 Illinois Watch Co. timepieces. After being captivated by the brand’s Art Deco designs, Friedberg started his quest to preserve the company’s history.
A decade later, he published The Illinois Watch & Its Hamilton Years, which clocks in at 24.5 pounds and 1,648 pages.
LA Times business reporter Daniel Miller stopped by LA Times Today to talk about his obsession.
Watch Los Angeles Times Today at 7 and 10 p.m. Monday through Friday on Spectrum News
STAR TRIBUNE ONLINE
Art Deco designs inspired Fredric J. Friedberg to be master of little-known Illinois watches
Fredric J. Friedberg, a retired attorney, once owned more than 700 Illinois Watch Co. timepieces.
IRVINE, Calif. – First, there’s the heft: 24.5 pounds.
Then, there’s the size: 1,648 pages.
But, really, it’s the topic of this five-volume book set that elicits the biggest surprise: the Illinois Watch Co.
Presidents, wars, social movements — few, if any, have prompted histories of this depth.
Yet Fredric J. Friedberg devoted a decade of his life to writing “The Illinois Watch & Its Hamilton Years,” a history of a defunct company that, odds are, you’ve never heard of.
Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times/TNS
Though not a household name like Rolex, Illinois was once at the vanguard of vibrant American watchmaking industry, crafting Art Deco-styled timepieces that rivaled the best from Switzerland in both accuracy and artistry.
Friedberg hopes his opus will reinvigorate interest in Illinois, which has been out of business for nearly 90 years. And even if it doesn’t, Friedberg could be satisfied knowing he completed a task that tested him in ways he never imagined when he began the work in 2008.
“My goal was to finish the book in two years,” said Friedberg, 75, a retired attorney who lives in Irvine. “I almost fried my brain on finishing the five-volume set.”
And among the indoctrinated — people like “A Clockwork Orange” star Malcolm McDowell — Friedberg’s project is peerless.
“There will never need to be another book on Illinois watches,” said McDowell, an Illinois collector.
It’s a story of devotion. It’s a story of perseverance. And for Friedberg, who once owned more than 700 Illinois watches, it’s a story, by his own admission, of obsession.
Friedberg can’t explain why he became fixated on vintage watches. But even as a child, he was a collector of things. Marbles. Popsicle sticks. Pennies from 1943 that were made with steel due to a World War II-era copper shortage.
“I have no idea why I was doing it,” he said.
In 1988, Friedberg, then an attorney in his mid-40s, found a new thing to collect. He was in Washington, D.C., on business, and during a stroll down Wisconsin Avenue, a vintage watch shop caught his eye. “I didn’t know stores like this existed. I was shocked.”
Friedberg went in without intending to make a purchase but, of course, did just that, picking up a delicate, rectangular model made by Girard-Perregaux in the 1940s.
“It felt like I had found heaven,” he said.
He began buying wristwatches in earnest. Perhaps, he said, memories of his father’s watch — a Hamilton with diamonds on the dial — spurred him along. But he dismisses high-minded explanations for his interest in horology, the study of the measurement of time.
“I mean, I just had an affinity for it,” he said.
But McDowell has some ideas about the enduring allure of wristwatches.
“Look, none of us need watches, we have the iPhone,” said McDowell, who befriended Friedberg around 2012. “It’s about telling a story. A watch tells the rest of the world who you are. And Illinois watches really are as good as anything made in Europe. These are under the radar. You feel a little bit special that you know something about them.”
Unlike a mobile phone, or a battery-powered quartz watch, mechanical timepieces are powered by a movement composed of gears, wheels, levers and springs. It can seem almost like alchemy — that simply winding a watch can bring to life its innards, allowing for something as ephemeral as the passage of time to be memorialized.
Anachronistic? Perhaps. But it’s also romantic to some.
For Friedberg, though, it was more about the hunt, especially in the beginning. He just kept buying watches. But Friedberg also had a young family and a big mortgage.
“I was afraid I’d put my family in the poorhouse because every time I went by an antique store I’d go in and buy watches,” he said. “I’d come home and I’d have a pile of crap, and they weren’t working and I said, ‘This is insane.’ ”
The Illinois Watch Co. was Friedberg’s salvation. Realizing he needed to narrow his focus, Friedberg homed in on the company’s wristwatches, their Art Deco elegance captivating him.
“No one touched Art Deco design like Illinois,” he said. “Plus it was an incredible story about American manufacturing, entrepreneurship and enterprise in this country.”
The Springfield, Ill., company was started in 1870, co-founded by industrialist John Whitfield Bunn, who had been a close friend of Abraham Lincoln. The company made its name turning out especially precise pocket watches that were used by railroads to keep accurate time, making train travel safer.
The factory that turned out Illinois’ precision instruments was a Gilded Age marvel. In a stroke of industrial innovation often overlooked amid praise for Henry Ford’s later accomplishments, the company’s timepieces were made on assembly lines.
John Cote, a member of the National Association of Watch & Clock Collectors’ board of directors, said the company’s standardized approach, especially when compared to the largely handmade pieces coming out of Switzerland at the time, is an important example of American ingenuity.
Illinois hit its stride during the boom years after World War I. Following the war, wristwatches became popular among men, in part because soldiers had grown accustomed to strapping pocket watches to their arms to more easily tell the time on the battlefield. According to Cote, during the 1920s, Illinois was the third-biggest American watch company by production volume, trailing only Elgin and Waltham.
It’s an inspiring era for modern American watchmakers including Cameron Weiss, who founded his eponymous Torrance-based watch brand in 2013.
But for Illinois, and later the rest of the American watchmaking industry, the boom years would soon end.
After its purchase by rival Hamilton in 1928, Illinois was buffeted by a series of changes and ultimately shut down during the Great Depression. And by the end of the 1960s, Hamilton, Elgin and Waltham had all ceased operating as American companies, either shuttering or selling to the Swiss.
While Illinois’ story ended on a melancholy note, Friedberg reckoned it made for a great tale. In 2004, Friedberg released “The Illinois Watch: The Life and Times of a Great American Watch Company.”
But he wasn’t satisfied with the book, which checks in at a comparably scant 272 pages. He began to fixate on the things he left out. In May 2018, “The Illinois Watch & Its Hamilton Years” was released by Schiffer Publishing. The $295 five-volume set is both sumptuous and encyclopedic, its in-depth history of the brand supplemented by a guide featuring every wristwatch model made by the company and essays from collectors, among other features. Volume Five even includes a 750-question quiz, and Friedberg writes that readers can e-mail him if they “get stuck on any question.”
Schiffer Publishing printed about 1,000 copies, and about 500 have been sold. Among the buyers have been a handful of notable institutions and organizations: The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, the Abraham Lincoln Research Library and the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors.
That’s a point of pride for Friedberg. The book set also has won praise from a notable group: people in the family tree of Bunn, the company’s co-founder.
“We admire him tremendously,” said Andrew Taylor Call, a Bunn great-great-great grandnephew. “I would say in absolute faith that Fredric Friedberg knows more about the Illinois Watch Co. than anyone alive today.”
Illinois Watch Book Guide for CollectorsI
_______________________________By Rhianna Wisniewski
STAFF WRITER (Courier News, Elgin, Illinois)
There was a point in time when Illinois was known for more than its baseball teams and politics. Now a thing of history books, the Illinois Watch Factory and Elgin National Watch Company once produced some of the most sought-after timepieces, coveted even today.
Art deco designs, inset jewels, a changing style, and reliable engineering have had amateur and professional collectors alike seeking out both types of watches. But as any collector knows, the most important part of a purchase is the research.
Unlike most books on bygone companies, a recently released book helps to give the watch collector and the historian something to cheer about. The Illinois Watch, The Life and Times of a Great American Watch Company is devoted entirely to the history and products of the Illinois Watch Company.
A comprehensive book by Fredric J. Friedberg, The Illinois Watch provides the reader with a complete and accurate chronology of events, from the company’s conception to its closing. The book also chronicles Friedberg’s journey into collecting, explaining to the amateur collector how not to repeat his mistakes. He even lists the prices, value, and details about almost every Illinois watch ever made.
Friedberg also does his best to make sure that local history is as appealing as possible to the common reader. While chronicling the progression of the company, Friedberg gives historical context as to what was happening in the world. He highlights important people and discoveries of the time, the most important world events, and after the history has been told, stories from collectors about their experiences with the Illinois watch.
It’s a wonderful book, said local resident Bill Briska, who has been a watch collector for the past few years.
According to Briska, who is more a collector of knowledge about watches than the actual pieces themselves, books like The Illinois Watch serve as guides for collectors everywhere, and are important because they immortalize an important piece of Illinois history, helping those who don’t collect appreciate the watches for what he believes they are: tiny pieces of art.
