Fed Millions of American Families. Why Were 80% of Clockmakers Destroyed in 30 Years?

The workshop skill that fed millions of American families for two full centuries. Eighty percent of the working American clockmaker shops operating in nineteen sixty were gone by nineteen ninety. The collapse was not caused by a falling demand for timekeeping. Americans own more clocks and watches today than ever before. In this vault we open the archive on the American clockmaker and watchmaker trade: The nineteen fifty four Waterbury, Connecticut origin point, when the Naugatuck Valley was the brass and clock making capital of the United States and supported more than fifteen thousand working professionals. What a working clockmaker earned in nineteen fifty four, when he outearned the average school principal and the average local pharmacist in his own town. Eli Terry, Seth Thomas, and the Connecticut clockmakers who built the original American clock industry and made accurate timekeeping affordable to ordinary working families for the first time in history. The Seiko Quartz Astron of nineteen sixty nine and the technology shift that displaced four centuries of mechanical movement work in less than a single decade. The closure of the Bowman Technical School, the Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking, the Gem City program, and nearly every other American watchmaking school across the nineteen seventies and eighties. The Lititz Watch Technicum, the North Seattle College program, and the narrow high end path back into a modern trade that now needs far more workers than it can find. If this vault opened something for you, leave a comment with the trade you wish your school had taught you instead of college prep. The skills they buried. The trades they erased. The income they hid from you. The next chain of the archive opens soon. #forgottentrades #clockmaker #watchmaker #skilledtrades #americanhistory #waterbury #lostmoney #tradejobs #bluecollar #vault