The secret message inside Abe Lincoln's watch

Jonathan Dillon was an Irish immigrant watchmaker who worked in a watch repair shop in Washington D.C. He told his children that on the day the news arrived of the attack on Fort Sumter he was repairing Lincoln's watch.

He told them he had inscribed a secret message inside the watch: "The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try."

The watch was given to the Smithsonian in 1958. No one has ever checked the truth of the man's story - until yesterday.

This morning, in a small conference room on the first floor of Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, officials decided to find out. Expert watchmaker George Thomas used a series of delicate instruments -- tweezers, tiny pliers -- to pull apart Lincoln's timepiece. He put on a visor with a magnifying lens and talked as he worked. Some of the pins were nearly stuck, he explained. The hands of the watch were original with a case made in America and the workings from Liverpool. The Illinois rail-splitter had splurged: The watch, Thomas said, would be the equivalent to a timepiece costing "$5,000 or more" today.

And then he pried off the watch's face, pulled off the hands, and turned it over to see the brass underside of the movement.

The audience, watching on a monitor, gasped.

To find out what they saw, go to the Washington Post article (sorry to do that to you, but it's more polite to drive traffic to a source rather than steal all the content...)

And I'm impressed by how expensive the watch was.