ile "pull-out lever" refers to a more conventional lever-set mechanism.
This data, although minimal, does yield several interesting observations:
- The stem wind/key set movements implied by the 1874 Elgin Almanac certainly do exist. Such watches are likely to be the earliest Elgin stemwinders.
- Elgin's serial number records are, unsurprisingly, fallible; there exist stem winders ≤300,000 that were not recorded as so.
- There is an extra piece to the puzzle that the materials above do not mention, which is the existence of two distinct lever setting mechanisms: George Hunter's 1874 slide lever set, and a more conventional pull-out lever set.
- The serial numbers may turn out to be a poor predictor of the mechanism in the watch. #155,399 and #155,743 are recorded as part of the same run, and only 344 serial numbers apart, yet one has lever setting and the other doesn't.
The most interesting of these questions is probably #3. Here I am hampered by the fact that I haven't learned to work on watches just yet (I really need to at this point), and my lack of knowledge of lever setting mechanisms; but as I best understand so far, the "pull out" lever set mechanism in these watches is more or less the same as what became the industry standard among American companies. This means that for all that Elgin's 1874 Almanac boasted of their proprietary lever set mechanism, they abandoned it very quickly in favor of the conventional design.