BALL Watch Company

On 18 April 1891 a fast mail train and a passenger train met head-on at Kipton, Ohio, some forty miles west of Cleveland, because the passenger train's conductor was carrying a watch that had stopped for four minutes and then started again. The jeweller Webb C. Ball was appointed Chief Time Inspector for the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway that July, and by September he had built the system that followed: written requirements, trained inspectors, some 2,300 watches prepared and checked, and four certified watches on every train, one each for the conductor, engineer, fireman and rear brakeman. Every two weeks they were compared against standard time from the Naval Observatory in Washington, and any watch more than thirty seconds out was readjusted or exchanged. By 1908 Ball was inspecting around 180 railroads and regulating more than a million watches. The Webb C. Ball Watch Company was formed in 1894 to distribute railroad watches, and the RR that still appears on every BALL watch stands for Railroad. The modern house is built around toughness and self-powered light: it dates its first mechanical watch lit by micro gas tubes to the Engineer of 2001, followed it with the Engineer Hydrocarbon in 2004, patented shock protection for the balance spring (SpringLOCK, 2013) and the regulator (SpringSEAL, 2017), and introduced its first manufacture calibre, the 7309, in 2017.