Rare Vintage Bulova WWII Medical Officer Men’s 17J Military Watch
DESCRIPTION
► ARCHIVE FILE: BULOVA — BRAND HISTORY
Joseph Bulova, a Bohemian immigrant, opened a small jewelry shop on Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan in 1875. By the 1920s the company he built had become a pioneer of standardized, mass-produced wristwatches, with a factory in Bienne, Switzerland feeding movements to New York assembly lines. Bulova also understood marketing earlier than almost anyone: it sponsored the first national radio time announcement in 1926 and, on July 1, 1941, aired the first television commercial ever broadcast, a simple Bulova clock face shown before a Brooklyn Dodgers game.
Bulova's defining achievement came on October 25, 1960, with the Accutron caliber 214, developed by Swiss engineer Max Hetzel. In place of a balance wheel, a 360 Hz tuning fork driven by a transistor circuit regulated the watch, which was guaranteed accurate to within a minute a month at a time when that figure was remarkable. The seconds hand swept smoothly and the watch hummed rather than ticked. Accutron timers flew aboard NASA satellites, and in 1971 astronaut David Scott wore a Bulova chronograph prototype on the lunar surface during Apollo 15.
The Accutron era produced some of the most distinctive American-market watches of the 1960s. The Spaceview, with its open dial exposing the green coils and tuning fork, began as a dealer demonstration piece and became a bestseller. The Astronaut added a 24-hour hand for jet crews, and the Oceanographer line, rated to 666 feet and nicknamed the Devil Diver, brought serious water resistance to the catalog. Alongside these, Bulova kept building solid 17- and 23-jewel self-winding mechanical watches that sold in enormous numbers.
For collectors, Bulova offers rare precision in dating: from 1950 onward the company stamped a two-character date code on case backs and movements, so an M9 marking pins a watch to 1969 exactly. Original-dial Spaceviews (many were later converted from standard 214s), honest Devil Divers, and running tuning-fork models with that distinctive hum are the prizes. Service matters, since Accutron repair is a specialist skill, but a properly maintained 214 still performs much as it did sixty years ago.
