BULOVA Watches

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About BULOVA

BULOVA is a New York based corporation making watches & clocks.

It was founded & incorporated as the J. BULOVA Company in 1875 by Joseph BULOVA (1851-1936), an immigrant from Bohemia. It was reincorporated under the name BULOVA Watch Company in 1923, & became part of the Loews Corporation in 1979. His name is possibly related to Bulawa, a Polish word for a type of mace.

BULOVA established its operations in Woodside, New York & Flushing, New York, where it made innovations in watchmaking, & developed a number of watchmaking tools. It is famous for a number of horological innovations, perhaps most notably the Accutron watch which used resonating tuning forks as a means of regulating the time keeping function. In July 1941 they paid $9 for the first television commercial, a 10-second spot on WNBT during a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers & Philadelphia Phillies.

The Joseph BULOVA School of Watchmaking was founded in 1945 by Arde BULOVA, Chairman of the Board, initially to provide training for disabled veterans after the Second World War.

"Accutron&qout; tuning fork watches, first sold by BULOVA, use a 360 hertz tuning fork to drive a mechanical gear train. The inventor, Max Hetzel, was born in Basel, Switzerland, & joined the BULOVA Watch Company of Bienne, Switzerland, in 1948. This outstanding engineer was the first one to use an electronic device, a transistor, in a wrist watch. Thus, Max Hetzel developed the first watch in the world that truly deserved the qualification "electronic": the world-famous "BULOVA Accutron". More than 4 million were sold until production stopped in 1977.

They also were subjects of the other famous space era rivalry with Omega Watches for being the first watch on the moon. Ultimately, the Omega Speedmaster Professional chronograph wristwatch (known as the "Moon watch") was designated by NASA for use by the astronauts in all manned space missions, becoming the first watch on the moon on the wrist of Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin.

However, all instrument panel clocks & time-keeping mechanisms in the spacecraft on those missions were BULOVA Accutrons with tuning fork movements, because at the time, NASA did not know how well a mechanical movement would work in zero gravity conditions.

Wikipedia contributors. BULOVA. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. April 30, 2007, 17:48 UTC. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/withindex.php?title=Bulova&oldid=127190034. Accessed May 1, 2007.

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