Seth Thomas Research

Welcome

A serene landscape featuring lush green hills and a clear blue sky.

The Seth Thomas Research website is the most accurate and comprehensive online resource for the factory's 29-year output of pocket watch production from 1885 to 1914, featuring:

Serial number lookup for model identification and search returns for rough dates
Over 40 charts for grade identification, SN runs, production totals and percentages
A separate page for each model to research dates, run totals, and known variants
An entire section devoted to private labels, sorted by name, dial, SN, and state
Pages for factory dials, hands, cases, period adverts, catalogs and surviving records
A section describing the known patents, including links to the US Patent Office
A Store for replacement parts by model, complete with the original factory number

Data Submissions

Photographs of new examples are always needed.

If you have any watches or paper records in your collection then please share them with us.

Catalog prints and period ads will be posted to the Records page, and your watch will be logged on the appropriate chart, adding to the totals and making the search functions more accurate.

Pocket watch dial and movement photos only, please.

Plagiarism

This website has been plagiarized several times by those too lazy to do their own research, most notably by Nathan Moore, the rich owner of the PW Database. One can't help but notice how the PWBD's totals seem to mirror the totals on this site soon after it's updated. Attached are numbers for the Seth Thomas two-tone Grade 36 Model 8 so far according to logged examples, along with Nathan Moore's number, which appear strangely identical.

Considering that there are no surviving records, where could have Nathan gotten his totals, if not from this site?

Seth Thomas Research

The total of 33,150 two-tone Model 8s (pictured here) is a red herring, a deliberately wrong number put there to see if he would "borrow" it.

PW Database

And Nathan Moore did just that, inventing a similar total of 33,300. The real total of two-tone Grade 36s is thousands of numbers away.