Vintage Bulova Men’s Art Deco Watch

► 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.