Self-Regulating Clocks and Watches : Jacob Rabinow
Discovering that one of his ideas had already been done before rarely surprised Rabinow. When he went to the Patent Office, he usually expected to find his invention had already been thought of and patented. What surprised and frustrated him was when one of the original and elegant ideas (“cute ideas” as he would say) for which he was able to gain a patent wasn’t marketable. This occurred for various reasons.
Rabinow’s experience with trying to market his self-regulating clock and self-regulating watch provides one example of the roadblocks the inventor faced. Between 1945 and 1956, he applied for patents on these devices and various improvements and variations to them. The mechanisms were self-regulating because the same external stem used to adjust a fast or slow clock or watch to the proper time was coupled to the rate regulator as well. If the time was changed by more than 15 minutes, as when one traveled into another time zone or adjusted for daylight saving time, the rate regulator was not affected. This system was labor saving and prevented the damage commonly inflicted to clock and watch cases when they were pried open to access internal regulators.
Rabinow encountered a great deal of resistance, especially from the manufacturers of jeweled watches. One time president of a well-established watch told him, “We advertise a perfect watch. How can we advertise anything better?” Finally the Benrus Company bought a license from Rabinow to produce watches with the regulator. It was a failure in the stores. All watches need occasional rate adjustments, but to market the watch on the basis of easy regulation was self-defeating. The very idea that a watch might need regulating indicated to customers that the watch was defective.