While sharing the surname of Charles Moseley, the first man in 1857/8 to manufacture the game-changing hollow-spindle watchmakers' lathe with its draw-in collet assembly - and both at one time in based in Elgin - it is not thought that the two were connected. In 1864, the National Watch Company of Chicago had invited Charles to join them as general superintendent of their Elgin factory - but had left there in 1877, some 12 years before Horace patented his length-stop mechanism.
The story of Charles Moseley's lathe is interesting, for it is certain that he never applied for a patent - despite later having eleven watch-related patents to his name. However, perhaps now we have the answer for this. When researching the subject, the writer came across a patent describing the ideas incorporated in Moseley's lathe, a patent taken out by George W. Daniels and a Mr A.Fuller, both residents in the watchmaking and precision engineering centre of Waltham. The patent was granted on October 19th, 1858, and though the application date is not stated, it could have been up to one year before. If we include the time necessary from the idea's inception to the development of prototypes, experiments with different materials and the possibility of pre-production examples being made in the early months of 1858, this matching of dates appears significant. Did Moseley take up a licience to use the patent - or buy it outright? If so, the latter must be the more likely as it appears to have been used exclusively by him until its expiry 20 years later - Messerer, some 31 years later in 1889, had mentioned the system in his conversion of a pair of turns to incorporate, between the centres of the turns, a 3-step pulley with a hollow spindle and draw-in collet. One year earlier, in 1888, Horace Moseley of Elgin had patented an adjustable length stop to be used in association with a draw-in collet and, in the patent below, he refers to established and 'usual' parts as though these would, by then, have been in almost everyday use. It seems clear that these inventors had searched each other's work and knew that the patent had expired.