The beginning: the jewellery shop

The story of Bulova begins in 1875, when Joseph Bulova, a young immigrant who had arrived in New York from Bohemia five years earlier, founded on Maiden Lane, Manhattan, the jewellery shop that would lay the foundations of American watchmaking innovation. In 1912, the company took a decisive step by opening in New York its first facility dedicated exclusively to watch manufacturing, based on a mass-production system with interchangeable parts, a genuine breakthrough at a time when watches were still made individually.

Throughout the twenties and thirties, Bulova established itself as a popular brand thanks to its watches in the art deco with models such as the Commodore, the Breton and the Banker.

Key milestones in its history

• 1912 — Opening of the company's first watch factory in New York, a pioneer in mass production with interchangeable parts.
• 1945 — At the end of the Second World War, Joseph Bulova founded the Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking, dedicated to training war veterans as watchmaking craftsmen.
• 1958 — Bulova began its collaboration with NASA, equipping the Vanguard 1 satellite with timekeeping technology, the start of a relationship that would extend to 46 space missions.
• 1960 — Launch of the Accutron, the world's first fully electronic watch, developed by Swiss engineer Max Hetzel: it replaced the traditional balance wheel with a tuning fork vibrating at 360 Hz, delivering unprecedented accuracy and a characteristic hum instead of the classic ticking.

• 1971 — During the Apollo 15 mission, commander David Scott wore a Bulova chronograph as a backup watch after his Omega failed, using it on his third moonwalk; the piece would be auctioned in 2016 for 1.625 million dollars, the most expensive astronaut-owned object sold up to that time.

• 2010 — Presentation of the Precisionist, a quartz watch with a high-frequency crystal (262,144 Hz) offering accuracy of just ten seconds a year and a continuous sweeping seconds hand, unusual in quartz watchmaking.
• 2016 — Launch of the Bulova CURV, the world's first chronograph with a curved-case quartz movement, another ‘first’ in the brand's long list of innovations.
• 2020 — The Citizen group separates Accutron from Bulova and relaunches it as an independent brand, while Bulova revives historic collections such as the Joseph Bulova Collection, inspired by the designs art deco of the twenties and thirties.
• 2025 — Bulova celebrates its 150th anniversary.

The manufacture today

Owned by the Japanese Citizen group since 2008, Bulova today maintains a catalogue that combines reissues of its most iconic historic pieces with in-house technologies such as the Precisionist and the CURV. The brand also retains distinctive hallmarks that form part of its identity, among them the Accutron, and a link with space exploration and aviation that few American watchmaking firms can match.