Vintage Bulova Watches
Vintage Bulova from the tuning-fork era and beyond, including Accutrons, divers, and clean mechanical dress watches. Every watch is the exact one pictured and ships tracked from the USA. Stock is small and changes constantly.
Read the detailed Bulova history4 Bulova timepieces in stock
The Bulova Story
A 23-year-old immigrant from Bohemia, Joseph Bulova opened a jewelry shop on Manhattan's Maiden Lane in 1875. His company grew on Swiss movements and American advertising. From 1926 its national radio time checks spelled out B-U-L-O-V-A, and on July 1, 1941, NBC's New York station showed a Bulova clock over a map of America before a Dodgers game, the first television commercial. The bill was nine dollars. From 1950 most Bulovas carry a decade letter and year digit on case back or movement; M9 means 1969.
At Bulova in Biel, engineer Max Hetzel replaced the balance wheel with a tuning fork vibrating 360 times a second, and the Accutron hummed instead of ticking. The caliber 214 went on sale in October 1960, guaranteed to a minute a month. The open-dial Spaceview began as a window display customers insisted on buying. Divers rated to 666 feet, not the usual 600, earned the Devil Diver name the Oceanographer carried from 1972. On August 2, 1971, after the crystal popped off his NASA-issued Omega, Apollo 15's David Scott walked on the Moon in his own Bulova chronograph.
Quartz undid it. Bulova had a quartz watch, the Accuquartz, by 1970, but cheaper rivals undercut it, and in 1975 the company lost $25 million on sales of $204 million. Stelux of Hong Kong took charge in 1976, and the last tuning-fork Accutrons were built in 1977. Loews Corporation bought Stelux out in 1979; the Biel factory closed in 1983.
Citizen of Japan, a Bulova partner by 1960, bought the company from Loews for $250 million in January 2008, and in 2015 Bulova moved into the Empire State Building, where it remains. Accutron became its own Citizen brand in 2020 with the electrostatic Spaceview 2020, while Bulova sells the Lunar Pilot, Precisionist and Curv lines. Its 150th year, 2025, brought the Limited Edition 150 Art Deco collection, and a tenth-anniversary Curv chronograph followed in February 2026. The vintage Bulovas here predate all of that; any that hum rather than tick run on Hetzel's tuning fork.