Bulova
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bulova is a New York based corporation making watches and clocks.
It was founded in 1875 by Joseph Bulova (1851-1936), an immigrant from Bohemia, and is now part of the Loews Corporation. His name is possibly related to Bulawa, a Polish word for a type of mace.
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 and Philadelphia Phillies.
Tuning fork watches (first sold by Bulova) use a 360 hertz tuning fork to drive a mechanical watch. The inventor Max Hetzel was born in Basle, Switzerland, and 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. At the end The Omega Speedmaster 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 in the wrist of Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin.
However all the instrument panel clocks and time-keeping mechanisms in the spacecraft on those space 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.
