This essay, about pocket watches and time consciousness in the nineteenth‐century United States, suggests that the increasing volume of pocket watches in circulation throughout the United States after the 1830s prodded a wide cross section of Americans into more than just simple awareness of mechanical time. The evidence, some of which is drawn from accounts relaying details about repairs to watches, shows that watches augmented, rather than replaced, already complex temporal sensibilities. The article includes estimates about the incidence of watch ownership, the kinds of watches Americans owned, and the sorts of repairs watches most commonly required.