In 1951, a young craftsman named Samuel Smith opened a jeweler’s shop at 149 Newington Causeway in the Elephant and Castle, south of the Thames. He was twenty-five, skilled in the delicate work of setting stones and fitting watch movements, and he traded under a name that would one day appear on the dashboard of nearly every car in Britain. For the first century of its existence, though, the firm sold the movements of other makers, cased and finished and retailed under its own name. Samuel Smith the elder died in 1875, and his son, also Samuel, pushed the business up the retail ladder of the West End, to the Strand, to Trafalgar Square, to Piccadilly.

By the end of the century, S. Smith and Son had become watchmakers to the Admiralty, trusted to supply the chronometers by which the Royal Navy navigated. It had earned the highest reputation a firm that bought in its movements could hold. The true transformation began in the basement of the Strand premises with the founder’s grandson, Alan Gordon Smith.

Born in 1881, he saw that the waistcoat watch was the past and the motor car the future. A car in 1904 had no reliable way to show its driver how fast he was traveling. In the basement, Alan Gordon Smith and his engineers built what is generally recorded as the first British speedometer. The first one sold went to King Edward VII, delivered to Buckingham Palace for his Mercedes.

No advertisement could have been better. In 1914, the manufacturing side was floated as a separate public company. Within weeks, war broke out, and the firm discovered that a maker of precision instruments was exactly what a mechanized war needed. It emerged larger and hardened.

Through the 1920s, Smiths pushed deeper into the motor trade and then let go of its origins entirely, selling off the retail jewelry business around 1929 and 1930. The shop that Samuel Smith had opened in 1851 closed for good. The firm had become a manufacturer. In 1930, Smiths made peace with its great rival, Lucas of Birmingham.

Under a trading pact, Lucas took the electrical trade and Smiths the instruments, carving the British motor industry between them. With the field to itself, Smiths became the instrument supplier to virtually every car and motorcycle maker in Britain. Then, in 1931, it entered the clock trade at precisely the right moment. The mains electric age had arrived, and a clock driven by a synchronous motor locked to the steady frequency of the supply would keep time without winding.

Smiths formed English Clocks Limited, bought established names, and by the mid-1930s was making roughly half of all the clocks produced in the United Kingdom, thousands every week. The company that had spent its first eighty years unable to make its own movements was now the timekeeper of the nation. When war came again, Smiths was ready. In 1939, Ralph Gordon Smith bought a farm near Cheltenham, dispersing production away from London before the bombing began.

In August 1940, the Luftwaffe found Cricklewood and destroyed the instrument repair department, but the Cheltenham factories were rising. Over the course of the war, Smiths produced more than ten million aircraft instruments, four million clocks, a million and a half speedometers and mileometers, and the fuses for shells. The altimeters and airspeed indicators that kept Spitfire pilots alive were Smiths instruments. In 1944, the business was reorganized into four divisions: motor accessories, aircraft instruments, industrial instruments, and English clocks.

Four pillars held up one of the most formidable manufacturing groups in the country. In the post-war golden age, the Cricklewood works had about eight thousand people passing through its gates at every shift, the largest single employer in the area. It was not a place of gentle ticking but of presses and lathes and the ceaseless clatter of small metal parts. The Sectric clock sat on mantelpieces across Britain, a solid, affordable object so woven into ordinary life that people never gave the name on the dial a second thought.

Cheltenham, grown from the camouflaged wartime site, had become the home of the firm’s finest work. From 1947, Smiths at last made genuine high-grade English wristwatches, designed and built from the ground up. They made their own jewels at a plant in Scotland. At the end of the decade, a factory rose at Ystradgynlais at the head of the Swansea Valley, known affectionately as the Tick Tock.

A joint venture with the American firm Ingersoll, it made cheap, robust pin lever watches in staggering numbers, over a million a year. Between the end of the war and 1980, more than thirty million watches left that valley for markets in sixty countries. The workforce was overwhelmingly female, and the factory put wages and a measure of independence into the hands of the valley’s women. It had football and rugby teams and an annual dance that crowned a Mr.

and Miss Tick Tock. It was, in the words of one worker, a godsend. On the 29th of May 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood on the summit of Mount Everest, and Smiths had been on the mountain. Hillary had carried a Smiths Deluxe wristwatch to the top.

It had worked perfectly. That autumn, he presented it to the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, where it remains on display in London. At the same time, the pact with Lucas was bearing its full fruit. If you drove a British car in the 1950s and 1960s, you drove behind Smiths instruments: the speedometer in the Jaguar E-Type, the gauges in the Aston Martin DB5 and the Mini and the Land Rover.

By 1964, Smiths employed around 25,000 people across 27 factories. It had renamed itself Smiths Industries. The view from the top was all triumph and no shadow. In 1969, on Christmas Day, Seiko put on sale the world’s first commercial quartz wristwatch.

The Astron cost as much as a small car, but inside it there was no mainspring, no balance wheel, no escapement, only a sliver of quartz vibrating by battery power that kept time to within a few seconds a month. The cost of the electronics collapsed almost immediately. By 1978, quartz watches outsold mechanical ones across the world. Smiths was hit by two waves at once: quartz at the top of the market and a flood of cheap clocks and watches from low-wage factories at the bottom.

But Smiths was not asleep. It had patented transistor clock movements as far back as 1958 and 1959. In 1962, it launched the Sectronic, an advanced electromechanical clock. At the start of the 1970s, a small team at Cheltenham set out to build a British quartz wristwatch, called the Quazar, to be ready for the trade fair at Basel in 1973.

It came together and it worked after a fashion, but it was flawed, expensive, and outclassed by Omega and Seiko. The chairman and managing director traveled to Japan and walked through Seiko’s factories. They saw the automation, the volume, the falling costs, and they came home and cancelled the Quazar in 1974. It was a clear-eyed judgment that they could not beat the Japanese, and they chose to protect the healthy parts of the company from the dying one.

The first cut had already come. In September 1970, Smiths announced that watch production at Cheltenham would end. The making of the genuine English wristwatch ceased by March 1971. The company began importing movements, including calibers from Japan.

In 1977, the clock and watch division was broken in two. In 1979, domestic clock production ceased. In June 1980, the Tick Tock closed, and the people of the Swansea Valley never let their factory be forgotten. In 1983, the clock company was closed, and Smiths sold its automotive instrument business to Lucas, the rival it had made peace with in 1930.

In a little over a decade, Smiths had walked out of the entire business of keeping time. But Smiths itself did not die. The four-division structure built in 1944 proved to be its salvation. The aircraft instruments business did not go under.

The medical and industrial systems businesses did not. In 1981, Francis Roger Hearn became chief executive, overseeing the final withdrawal from clocks and cars and the turn toward aerospace and medicine. In 2000, the company merged with TI Group to become Smiths Group, a constituent of the FTSE 100, a substantial global engineering business with barely a clock to its name. Today, the Cricklewood site holds a discount clothing shop and a DIY store.

The Tick Tock was demolished in 2011 and a Tesco superstore stands on the ground. But in a small firm in a neighboring Welsh village, a handful of workers still make Smiths-branded gauges for classic cars, hands that learned their craft at the Tick Tock. And at Cheltenham, the site never fell silent. The aircraft instrument business became avionics and runs today as a high technology aerospace plant.

The watch that went to Everest still sits in a glass case in London, keeping no time at all now, keeping something else. The clock stopped. The company did not.

Both of those things are true.