Old Timekeepers

The name of the biggest U. S. clockmaker has never appeared on the face of a U. S. clock--General Time Instruments, Inc. Last week for the first time this name appeared on the New York Stock Exchange. As unfamiliar to the average investor as to the average clock owner, GTI is known by its two chief subsidiaries, Western Clock Co. ("Big Ben") and Seth Thomas Clock Co. of Thomaston, Conn. These two old family enterprises were put together in 1930 to form the company which now accounts for one-third of the entire U. S. clock business. Instead of celebrating this union with a stock party for the public, GTI merely swapped its shares for the holdings of the owning families, and until last April there were only 150 shareholders.

Then GTI offered these stockholders the right to buy 75,600 shares of additional common, the proceeds to retire some of its preferred stock and to bolster its cash position after clearing up dividend arrears on the rest. Of the total offering the old stockholders took 21,000 shares. The balance was taken up by a banking group headed by Kidder, Peabody & Co., which offered it to the public. Listing was the sequel to that offering.

Oldest of GTI's two venerable subsidiaries is Seth Thomas, which dates back to 1813 when a young Yankee gathered tools and helpers to make grandfather clocks in Connecticut's Naugatuck Valley. At first the parts were wooden and fitted only one clock. Later clockmakers shifted to brass and eventually evolved precision methods, interchangeable parts. Clock-making was the first real mass production in the U. S. No Connecticut craftsman built better than Seth Thomas I, few as well, and by 1853 he had sold enough clocks to organize a formal company with $75,000 capital, sizable money in those days.

Founder Thomas did not live to see his home town renamed Thomaston, but he left a good business and an honorable tradition to Seth Thomas II and other sons, who passed them on to Seth Thomas III and finally to Seth Thomas IV. The Thomases stuck to quality products, but their line broadened to include nearly everything from delicate chronometers to the world's biggest clock, installed in 1924 in Colgate-Palmolive-Peet's Jersey City plant for the benefit of commuters across the Hudson River. Seth Thomas IV was president of his family concern from 1915 until the merger, when he became GTI's board chairman. He sired two daughters but no sons. After his death in 1932 the clock industry was without a Seth Thomas for the first time in nearly a century and a quarter.

GTI still has plenty of timekeeping talent in the person of President Ralph H. Matthiessen, scion of the other GTI clock family. The first clock-making Matthiessen was a German immigrant with a Heidelberg education who made good with a zinc smelter in La Salle, Ill. He had an idea that clocks could be soldered together instead of riveted, at a great saving. In 1885 he founded Western Clock Co. near his smelter. His competitors called his Westclox line "lead clocks," but they sold faster & faster, and in 1910 Western made clock history by pricing a "Big Ben" at $2.50.

Curiously, President Matthiessen inherited his interest in time not from his father, who was one of the founders and the first president of Corn Products Refining Co., but from his mother, who was a daughter of the Westclox founder and married a relative of the same name. Now 46, tall, rangy, athletic, President Matthiessen lives at Irvington-on-Hudson outside Manhattan. In announcing a smart increase in GTI's first quarter earnings ($310,000 against $135,000), President Matthiessen cautiously warned that part of the "abnormal increase" was caused by the introduction of several new models.

Most promising new clock is actually a watch. In the industry non-jeweled watches are often called clocks, always counted as clocks. The jeweled watch is an industry by itself.* Development of GTI's new low-priced watch was in line with the company's aim to blanket the clock field. Last year it bought Stromberg Electric to broaden its list of devices like time stamps, job recorders, in-&-out recorders.

In assets ($11,500,000) as in sales ($8,000,000 last year) GTI is about twice as big as its nearest competitor, E. Ingraham Co. of Bristol, Conn., makers of Ingersoll watches. Other big clockmakers are New Haven Clock Co., Waterbury Clock Co. and Warren-Telechron, which is now a General Electric subsidiary. Waterbury makes electric clocks for Westinghouse. In a normal year the clock industry sells $35,000,000 worth of time instruments. but "normal" is now only a sweet memory. In 1932 the figure was down to approximately $13,000,000. Last year it was around $25,000,000. With business at that level GTI was able to make $851,999.

* Jeweled watches are subdivided into companies making both cases and works and those making cases but importing the works. Gruen and Bulova are the leading importers; Hamilton, Elgin and Waltham, the leading manufacturers.

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