Edward Howard

Edward Howard trained under Aaron Lufkin Dennison and became a co-founder of the enterprise, through several corporate reorganisations, that developed the American system of machine-made watch manufacture and eventually became the Waltham Watch Company. After the venture's early financial difficulties and reorganisation, Howard separated from the Waltham lineage and established his own firm, E. Howard & Co., in Roxbury, Massachusetts, producing high-grade watches, precision tower and regulator clocks, and later scales and other precision instruments.

E. Howard & Co. became particularly known for railroad-grade and high-jewel-count watches and for large public tower clocks installed in American civic buildings, maintaining a reputation for quality distinct from, though commercially smaller than, the mass-market volume of Waltham and Elgin. Howard's watches are generally understood as a premium, lower-volume American product line compared with the larger industrial output of his former partners' firm.

The E. Howard name and trademark passed through several later owners after Edward Howard's own retirement and death, and, as with other historic American names, twentieth-century products bearing the Howard name should be understood as belonging to a later corporate phase distinct from Edward Howard's own nineteenth-century workshop.