The second purpose is that they’re usually much less exact, and fewer prone to produce dependable watches, than automation. This isn’t to say that there isn’t some hand work concerned – setting watch palms is commonly finished manually or semi-manually, and there are different meeting processes, even in very giant collection manufacturing, which might be finished by people, not robots. However for sensible causes, the watch business has, in truth, moved as rapidly away from making issues by hand as doable. The large American watch factories run by firms like Waltham and Elgin, which produced watches by the thousands and thousands, had been by the late nineteenth century, miracles of industrialization, not craft, and European makers adopted go well with as rapidly as they might.