Part IThe Story
Sometime in the 1970s, a jeweler in Boone, Iowa, named Walter Donald Eckstein boxed up a steel chronograph and sent it to the Bulova Watch Company in New York to be cleaned. The provenance letter that travels with the watch does not give the year, and nobody at the factory seems to have written it down. The watch had a glossy black dial with gilt printing and luminous hands. Inside was a Valjoux VZ ébauche, finished and signed by Bulova and stamped with the company's date code for 1941, the year the United States entered the Second World War. The caseback carried one engraved sentence: To Genl. Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a token of my admiration and respect. It was signed Arde Bulova.
Eckstein had come by the watch honestly, if indirectly. Eisenhower gave it to Joel Carlson, the uncle of Mamie Doud Eisenhower, on one of the family's frequent visits to Boone, Mamie's hometown. Years later Carlson no longer wanted to keep it up. Eckstein offered him a new Bulova wristwatch in exchange, and Carlson, who apparently wanted a working watch more than a relic, took the deal. So a present from a watch-company chairman to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces ended up behind the counter of a small-town jewelry store, traded for a newer model of the same brand.
The watch came back from New York with a note: No charge, courtesy of the factory.
Consider what "the factory" was by then. Arde Bulova had been dead since March 18, 1958. Gulf and Western Industries had bought a stake in his company in 1973 and sold it in 1976 to Stelux, a Hong Kong maker of watch components. Within a few years the Tisch family's Loews Corporation would absorb what was left. Collectors trying to reconstruct the firm's early history say that much of its archive, possibly all of it, was "lost or destroyed in the late 1970s." The institution that waived the fee probably had no file on the watch, no memo about the general, and little memory of the man who had ordered the engraving. It honored the debt anyway. It no longer knew what it owed or why. It simply knew how to behave.
That small, unrecorded courtesy says about as much about Arde Bulova as anything in the record, because the record is thin and contradictory. Sources disagree on when he was born. A collectors' history says 1889. A memorial listing says 1887. An auction-house essay says he became vice president "in 1911 at age 26," which would put his birth around 1885. Trade obituaries sometimes add an accent, Ardé, and sometimes leave it off. He was chairman of one of the most heavily advertised companies in America for twenty-eight years, yet he left almost no first-person quotations behind. What he left were transactions: a cash prize, a cornerstone, a stock option given by handshake, a contested lease, a disputed estate, a sentence on the back of a watch. This profile is assembled from those receipts.
By the Numbers
Arde Bulova's Instruments
1930–1958Arde Bulova's tenure as chairman of the board, held until his death
$1,000Prize Arde offered in 1926 to the first pilot to fly the Atlantic nonstop
5,000Lone Eagle watches available the day after Lindbergh landed, sold out in three days
$4–$9Price of the world's first television commercial, aired July 1, 1941
20 of 20Top U.S. radio shows sponsored by Bulova by 1940
7Students in the first class of the Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking, 1945
$1.1MCash Arde received for his Investors Inter-Continental stock, October 30, 1957
An Inheritance Measured in Ten-Thousandths
The father came first, and he started with rings.
Joseph Bulova was from Louny, a town in Bohemia. He arrived in Manhattan in 1870, at nineteen. According to the documentary the company released for its 150th anniversary, he worked for Charles Tiffany before going out on his own. In 1875, at twenty-three, he opened a shop on Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan, the street where the city's jewelers clustered by the hundreds. The earliest evidence of the business is what you would expect from a jeweler and not from a watchmaker. A newspaper reported a robbery at his store in January 1884. Advertisements for J. Bulova jewelry ran in 1897 and 1907. A 1904 trade reference lists two trademarks registered to J. Bulova Co., one for earrings and one for gold rings, while its separate sections for watch and clock trademarks have no Bulova entry at all. The company's first recorded use of its own name for "watches, movements, cases, and parts thereof" dates to 1907. The family that would later tell America what time it was spent its first three decades selling Americans jewelry.
Arde entered the business in 1905. On June 7, 1911, the firm was incorporated in New York as the J. Bulova Company with $50,000 in capital, Joseph as president and Arde as vice president and treasurer. The same year the company arranged to open a plant in Providence, Rhode Island, and began making boudoir clocks, table clocks, and pocket watches. Then came Switzerland. The company dates its first plant in Bienne (Biel, to German speakers) to 1912. One collectors' history puts the movement factory there in 1919. The sources disagree by seven years, a fitting margin of error for a business whose product was supposed to remove error.
The decisive idea arrived in 1923. On April 26 the company was reincorporated as the Bulova Watch Company, Inc., its capital raised to $1,000,000. One corporate history says the new name reflected "the growing role of Arde Bulova, Joseph's son, in the firm's management." By the company's own account, the same year brought "total standardization of parts." Every component was machined to a tolerance of one ten-thousandth of an inch, so that any part from one Bulova would fit the same position in any other. The firm said this "revolutionizes the servicing of watches," and the claim was larger than it sounds. A watch built by hand depended on the hand that built it. A watch built from interchangeable parts could be repaired by any competent person at any bench in the country. Interchangeability turned every local repairman into an agent of the brand and spread trust across thousands of strangers. Later admirers called Joseph "the Henry Ford of watchmaking" and his Bienne method the "American Watchmaking System." The phrase is notable mostly for where it was practiced: in Switzerland, by a Bohemian immigrant, for American customers.
Women were part of the plan from early on. The company dates its Rubaiyat line, which it calls the first full collection of women's jeweled wristwatches, to 1917. Between 1922 and 1930 it marketed 350 different ladies' Art Deco models and at least as many for men. A woman once ran the Swiss factory. The anniversary documentary mentions this in passing, and nobody seems to have recorded her name.
Joseph Bulova died on November 18, 1936. Decades later the training manual of the school his son founded described him as Arde's "beloved father and teacher," a man who "not only taught his son the art of expert craftsmanship but also instilled in Arde Bulova an awareness of the importance of training men for a trade so they might lead purposeful and meaningful lives." That is an institution writing piously about its namesake, and it should be read that way. Still, the sentence identifies what passed from father to son. It was less a gift for watches than a theory about men: that a trade could put a life back together, and that a standardized part, made exactly enough, could be fitted by anyone who had been taught.
Selling the Hour Itself
The company's advertising career is usually told as a list of firsts, and the list is real. It also hides the strategy behind it. Bulova was not mainly advertising watches. It was claiming the authority to say what time it was.
The national campaign started in the Saturday Evening Post in 1922. In 1926 the company put what it calls the nation's first radio commercial on the air, and the copy survives in several versions, as broadcast copy tends to. One reads: "At the tone, it's eight o'clock, Bulova Watch Time." Another spells out the name: "At the tone, it's 8 P.M., B-U-L-O-V-A, Bulova watch time." A third, recalled in the anniversary film, adds "For supreme accuracy." The wording mattered less than the tone itself, which Wikipedia describes, a little breathlessly, as "the first beep in history." Millions of Americans heard a signal, then a brand name, and only then the hour. The order of those three things was the whole business model.
Then the company built something to support the claim. In 1927 the Bulova Watch Company moved to 580 Fifth Avenue and put an observatory on the roof for taking sidereal time, the first observatory ever built on top of a skyscraper, according to the company. A mathematician ran it. His readings were recorded electrically and instantly on a chronograph hundreds of feet below, where they guided the watchmakers in the firm's Setting and Timing unit. As marketing, it was spectacle: a watch company looking at the stars from the middle of Manhattan. As engineering, it was a real calibration chain running from the sky to the roof to the bench. The two were inseparable, and that was the cleverness of it. The publicity and the product were the same thing.
The appetite for media grew from there. A clock radio arrived in 1928, combining the device that announced the time with the device that kept it. A patented automobile clock followed in 1929. Electric clocks came in 1931, with a claim of priority the Warren Telechron Company could fairly dispute, since it had been selling electric clocks since 1912. That same year the company ran what corporate histories call the watch industry's first million-dollar advertising campaign, two years into the Depression. In 1932 it ran a "Name the Watch" contest for a new $24.75 model, with a $1,000 top prize and $10,000 in total prizes, which amounted to paying the public to help write the copy. By 1940 Bulova sponsored every one of the twenty most popular radio shows in the United States. For years the largest lighted sign in New York City advertised Bulova watches.
On July 1, 1941, the first day the Federal Communications Commission allowed commercial advertising on television, Bulova bought airtime on WNBT, the New York station later known as WNBC, before a Brooklyn Dodgers–Phillies game. Accounts put the price between $4.00 and $9.00. The image was a station test card altered to look like a clock face. The Bulova logo and the words "Bulova Time" sat in the lower right quadrant while a second hand swept around the dial for one minute. A later corporate history remembers it differently, as a clock laid over a map of the United States with the line "America runs on Bulova time." Both versions agree on the essentials. There was no product shot, no pitchman, and no price. For sixty seconds the brand showed the country what time it was and let the country make the connection.
Through the 1960s, long after the first television ad, Bulova outspent every other American watchmaker on marketing. By 1968 it had more than 20,000 distributors in the United States, having moved past jewelry stores into general merchandise. Those numbers belong to Arde's successor. The habits behind them were formed under Arde, who became chairman in 1930, the year before the first million-dollar campaign, and who held the job for the rest of his life.
Paying for the Hero Before He Lands
In 1926 Arde Bulova, according to the company's own timeline, offered $1,000 to the first pilot to fly nonstop across the Atlantic.
The size of the prize is not the point. Larger purses were available, and a watch company's thousand dollars did not send anyone into the air. The point is the timing. Arde paid for his association with the hero before there was a hero. He bought an option on an event that had not yet happened, at a fixed price, and when it happened, the option was worth more than the purse.
Charles Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris alone in 1927. His crossing earned him a Bulova watch and the $1,000 check. In a telegram to the Bulova Watch Company he said the watch:
— Charles Lindbergh, telegram to the Bulova Watch Company, 1927keeps accurate time and is a beauty.
Eight words, and every brand manager since would recognize them as testimonial copy. What happened next is the more instructive part. According to the company, Bulova shipped 5,000 Lone Eagle watches, packaged with pictures of Lindbergh, and they were on sale the day after he landed. The whole supply sold out in three days. Over the next few years the company sold nearly 50,000 more. The Lone Eagle became the brand's best-selling watch. Fame had a short life and Bulova knew it. The inventory, the packaging, and the photographs had been ready before the plane reached Le Bourget.
The pattern did not start with Lindbergh. In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge presented a Bulova to Stanley "Bucky" Harris, player-manager of the World Series champion Washington Senators, and the company designed a model for the occasion and named it the "President." In 1928, after Amelia Earhart crossed the Atlantic, Bulova issued the "Lady Lindy." It never gathered the Lone Eagle's collector following, partly because even its name made her a footnote to a man.
The year 1927 contained, compressed into twelve months, most of what Arde would spend his career doing. The Lone Eagle came out. The company listed on the American Stock Exchange and opened Bulova Canada. It moved to Fifth Avenue and put the observatory on the roof. It also trademarked the name Westfield, a second, cheaper line with lower jewel counts and plainer cases and straps, whose movements were also Swiss-made but different from the flagship's. Westfield appears as a subsidiary by 1931. Under one corporate roof, in one year, the firm reached up toward heroes and down toward the budget buyer. Prestige and price were handled as separate problems, each with its own brand.
Decades later, a writer reviewing Assouline's commemorative book Bulova: A History of Firsts mentioned in passing that he had attended Charles A. Lindbergh Elementary. It was a small, unplanned confirmation of how well the 1926 option paid off. The hero's name ended up on schoolhouses, and the watch company had bought its share of him early.
Generals, Tariffs, and a Golf Clubhouse in Flushing
War favored a company built on precision, and Bulova shifted its production to the U.S. armed forces. A plant opened in Valley Stream, Long Island, in 1941. Among the products was the A-11 pilot's watch, later nicknamed "the watch that won the war." The 1941 date stamp on the Eisenhower chronograph places that gift in the same year.
The war also reached Arde's private property, and the record of that is less heroic. On August 14, 1942, the United States filed to condemn a leasehold on 5.741 acres in Queens belonging to Arde Bulova, at the corner of Jewel Avenue and Park Drive East in Flushing. The land held a three-story clubhouse of stucco over frame, built in 1928 for golf, and a one-story caddy house of stucco and fieldstone. The golf had ended in 1938, when, as the federal judge put it, "the greens were torn up, and the sod sold, and some 50 acres of the golf club property were turned into a parking lot." The government took possession on July 21, 1942. Both sides agreed in writing that no rent was owed for any earlier date. The only question for trial was the property's fair annual rental value. On August 9, 1943, Judge Campbell of the Eastern District of New York ruled on it. The filings name Arde Bulova as defendant, represented by Skinner & Bermant.
The case is not a scandal. It is a reminder that patriotism and price negotiation coexisted easily in the same man. Arde's company made watches for pilots, and his lawyers argued over the rent on a clubhouse that had become a parking lot. Both were reasonable. They show different sides of him.
His relationships with generals ran deeper than one engraved chronograph. Emily Bulova, his sister, was married to Harry Davis Henshel, who served in the Army in Europe during the war as a colonel, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, under General Omar Bradley, according to Phillips' auction notes. Bradley and Eisenhower had graduated together from West Point in 1915, in what became known as "the class the stars fell on": of 164 graduates, 59 became generals and two became five-star generals. After Arde's death, Bradley became chairman of the board of the Bulova Watch Company, holding the post from 1958 until his retirement, after which Harry Bulova Henshel took the title in 1974. For sixteen years a Bohemian jeweler's company was chaired by a man whose name was attached to the American victory in Europe.
That network had a policy side. As president, Eisenhower raised the tariff on imported watches, a move Phillips says was "passionately supported by Bulova, an American watchmaking company." The phrase "an American watchmaking company" deserves a closer look. Since 1912, or 1919, Bulova's movements had come from Bienne. The firm also had factories in Woodside and Flushing and Valley Stream, workers in Queens, and a domestic business to protect. By the 1950s it was both an importer and a manufacturer, and it lobbied for the protection that suited the manufacturer. The engraving on the chronograph's caseback said admiration and respect. Movement, engraving, general, and tariff each describe a different part of the same company, and none of them alone tells you whose side it was on.
Private Instruments
Arde did not always distinguish between his own holdings and the company's, at least not in the way a later securities lawyer would want.
On August 17, 1944, as the chairman of the board and, in the words of the Tax Court, "the chief stockholder" of the Bulova Watch Company, he orally granted Rose Kane an option to buy Bulova stock. Rose was the wife of Joseph Kane, whom the company was trying to recruit and who would have to move from Cincinnati to New York. The option was later put in writing, tied to the agreement setting Joseph's terms, and made exercisable only while Joseph was employed. Rose exercised it three times, each time when the market price was above the option price. In 1956 the Commissioner of Internal Revenue argued, and Judge Harron's opinion summarized, that the evidence showed the option's "dominant motive" was "to provide the 'clincher' in obtaining Joseph's services."
The clincher. The word comes from a tax court record, not a boardroom memoir, but it is the most revealing description of how Arde recruited. He did not offer the candidate a bonus. He offered the candidate's wife a stake, from his own shares, in the company the candidate was joining. It was personal, informal, and effective, and twelve years later it produced a federal tax case. He seems to have run the company the way a Maiden Lane jeweler runs a shop, on handshakes and favors, after it had become a company listed on a stock exchange.
His real estate had a mind of its own too. After the war he filed papers to build a small watch factory on land he owned at Queens Boulevard and Yellowstone Boulevard in Forest Hills. Residents of Forest Hills and Forest Hills Gardens fought it hard. They predicted too many cars, too many trucks, too much noise. The fight made the front page. The residents won and the project died in 1950. A local columnist later wrote that the only winners were the neighborhood children, who set up a temporary baseball diamond on the empty lot. In 1960 a little-known builder named Jack Parker acquired the land and began building Forest Hills' tallest buildings, twenty stories. Parker Towers was finished in 1961, and it brought more people, traffic, and trucks than Arde's factory would have.
One more item belongs among the private instruments, though it can only be pointed to. Arde Bulova's name is attached as a tag to a radio historian's multipart account of the creation of WNEW, New York's independent station. The series is titled "A Radio Station & its Mistress!" The archive gives us the headline and the tag and nothing more. Whatever happened there, Arde's private life is no better documented than his birth year.
Timekeepers by Marriage
The men around Arde Bulova kept time for a living, sometimes literally.
Harry Davis Henshel was born in Rochester, New York, on June 29, 1890. He worked as a clerk for the Erie Railroad, in the industry that had made standardized time necessary in America, and in 1911, while still young, he became chairman of the basketball committee of the Metropolitan Association of the Amateur Athletic Union. On April 22, 1918, he married Emily Bulova and joined his father-in-law's watch company, then based in Flushing. By 1930 he was a vice president and one of its principal executives, and later vice chairman. He served on the U.S. Olympic Basketball Committee from its founding in 1936 until his death, and chaired it during the 1950s. He was a colonel in Europe during the war. In 1948 he helped found the United States Committee Sports for Israel and was its first president. In 1960 he was a delegate from New York to the Democratic National Convention. He died on May 15, 1961, three years after his brother-in-law.
His son, Harry Bulova Henshel, carried his grandfather's surname as a middle name. He was born in New York on February 5, 1919. At Brown, which he finished in 1940, he regularly served as the timekeeper at college track meets in the city. He rose to captain in the war, then joined the family firm, "under the elder Bulova's tutelage," in the words of the trade obituaries, and learned the business "from the bottom up," including time as a traveling salesman. In 1948 he developed the Bulova Phototimer, a combined photo-finish camera and precision electronic timer and the first automatic timing device used in competitive sports. In 1951 he finished an MBA at Harvard and moved to Scarsdale. Politically he took the opposite side from his father: he was a Willkie Republican and later chairman of Scarsdale's local Republican committee, yet he went to the 1960 Democratic convention, where his father sat as a delegate.
So the family's three generations rhyme. Joseph standardized the part. Harry D. moved from railroad clerk to Olympic official. Harry B. timed the race and then built the machine that timed it. Arde, between them, put the company's name on the hour. These men believed, in their different ways, that time was a public good that could be made exact, made official, and made into a business.
The rhymes extend to the question of credit. Who founded the Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking? The company, its 1980 training manual, and nearly every account say Arde Bulova, in 1945. The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry on Harry D. Henshel says he "established a school of watchmaking for paraplegic war veterans." Harry B.'s obituaries say he "helped found" it. One trade paper says it was "begun and funded by family members." The school had several fathers, as successful projects do, and the family seems to have been happy to share the credit rather than settle it.
To Serve Those Who Served Us
In 1945 the Bulova Watch Company Foundation opened a tuition-free school for disabled veterans of the Second World War. It had seven students. The cornerstone carried a five-word motto: To Serve Those Who Served Us. The school's training manual, which went through at least thirteen editions, said the cornerstone was laid "without fan-fare or headlines heralding his contribution to society." The manual meant this as praise, and from a company that had bought the first radio spot and the first television spot, it is also gently funny. For once, a Bulova project began quietly.
The idea itself was not new. In 1921 Britain's Horological Journal published "Training our Disabled in Watch and Clock Repairing," reporting that the British Horological Institute had quickly seen the value of the trade for "disabled men who were left with the free use of their arms and hands," and that more than 1,000 men were in training across the United Kingdom. The logic was the same on both sides of the Atlantic. Veterans generally preferred earning a living to drawing a pension. The war had killed many young craftsmen and left employers short of watchmakers. The work needed little mobility. What Arde added was scale and construction, and construction is where his biography finally becomes concrete.
With company money, the school built a dedicated building at 40-24 62nd Street in Woodside, Queens, on a narrow side street, in a high-style Georgian manner that one later writer read as an attempt to connect the company with America's past. A 1950s promotional pamphlet produced with the Veterans Administration describes the interior in the plain language of a specification sheet, and it is the most affecting document in the whole Bulova record:
— Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking promotional pamphlet, 1950s, produced with the Veterans AdministrationThere is an elevator with doors at opposite sides, so that a man need not turn his wheel chair around to get out. Entrance doors open by an electric eye. Ramps instead of thresholds at all rooms… Floors of cork to prevent skidding.
The elevator with doors on opposite sides is the detail to keep. Someone sat in a wheelchair, or watched a man in one, and understood that turning around in a small box in front of other people was a small humiliation that could be designed out of existence. Nobody required it. There was no disability-access law to satisfy. It was a decision about dignity made at the level of hinges and floor plans by a company whose founding idea was tolerances of one ten-thousandth of an inch. The same habit of precision was now aimed at a different problem.
The rest of the building followed. Thresholds gave way to ramps. A physical therapist worked on site, with a full rehabilitation facility and a medical department. After 1965 there was a heated, fully accessible swimming pool. The VA invited Bulova to start training inside hospitals such as Walter Reed, so men could begin learning before they were discharged. The pamphlet called the method the "Bulova Plan," "a pattern for American" something; the surviving excerpt breaks off before the noun. Graduates were guaranteed jobs in the jewelry industry. The school later grew into a full rehabilitation facility, a national advocate for disabled people, and one of the founders of wheelchair sports in the United States.
The curriculum is preserved in the manual, reissued as Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking. The 2003 edition from the American Watchmakers-Clockmakers Institute runs 344 pages and eleven chapters, with first-phase training built around the 10AK caliber. The watchmaking course averaged eighteen months, "depending on the individual's progress according to his ability and effort." By 1950, as demand for watchmakers kept rising, the school also took disabled civilians, many referred by state vocational rehabilitation agencies. In 1958, the year Arde died, it added an eight-month Precision Technician Course for instrument makers, assemblers, and bench machinists. Graduates were trained to repair "all kinds of watches including the more complicated types such as automatics, calendars, chronographs, electric and the new Accutron timepiece."
The school was charitable, and it was also a training pipeline for the watch trade. It produced skilled bench workers for an industry that needed them, trained them on the company's own movements, and placed them with the jewelers who sold the company's watches. Recognizing that does not diminish the school. It explains why it lasted. Generosity that also serves the giver's business tends to survive longer than generosity that doesn't. Arde's father had standardized parts so that any competent bench could repair a Bulova. Arde trained the people to staff those benches, and he recruited them from the men the war had sent home injured.
The school did eventually close, and the sources cannot agree on when. Wikipedia and the Veterans Watchmaker Initiative say 1993. Harry B. Henshel's obituaries say the late 1990s or "around 2000." A watchmaking blogger in Buenos Aires, writing about the manual, says 1972. A mid-1990s trade item complicates the earliest dates: it reports that Norman Morris of Harrison, New York, age ninety-six, a watch importer for sixty-five years who had made the Swiss Omega well known in America, pledged $25,000 to open the school's first fundraising campaign, with a goal of $5 million. Morris said he gave because he had known Arde and his father Joseph.
— Norman Morris, watch importer, on his pledge to the Joseph Bulova SchoolWhen I was in the watch business, we employed over 50 watchmakers. [Now] most of the older watchmakers have retired or passed on and the younger generation doesn't think of watchmaking when they think of a career.
The building still stands. It is a church now.
The Last Instrument
Arde Bulova died on March 18, 1958. His will was admitted to probate on May 2. Afterward his family and his institutions spent most of a decade in court.
The estate was represented by Phillips, Nizer, Benjamin, Krim & Ballon, the firm of Louis Nizer, one of the best-known litigators in the country. The executrices were Emily Bulova Henshel, Arde's sister, and Louise Guilden. His widow, Ileana Maria K. Bulova, tried to take her statutory share as surviving spouse under Section 18 of New York's Decedent Estate Law. The Surrogate's Court ruled that she had validly waived that right during Arde's lifetime. She appealed. On October 24, 1961, Justice Charles Breitel of the Appellate Division wrote the decision. The case caption reads like a family tree drawn up for litigation. The respondents included Harry Bulova Henshel and a list of children represented by a special guardian: Dale June, Patti Jo, Dianne Susan, and Judith Anne Henshel, Harry B.'s four daughters; Lynn, Peter, and Barbara Gale; and David Guilden. A man who had built his company on careful agreements left a marriage governed by an agreement too, and his widow lost on it.
The school, which was his most personal project, became the subject of the most complicated litigation. In October 1957, five months before he died, Arde decided "for reasons not presently material," as a federal judge later put it, to sell his stock in a company called Investors Inter-Continental Corporation. A man named Amzalak offered to provide $1,100,000 immediately to a new corporation he would set up to buy all of Arde's shares for cash, on one condition: if the new corporation recovered more than $1,100,000 when it liquidated Investors' assets, the surplus would go to the Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking. Amzalak formed Orbis Trade and Financial Company on or about October 16, 1957. On or about October 30, Orbis paid Arde $1,100,000. Investors was dissolved. By the end of September 1963, Orbis had liquidated substantially all of its assets for about $900,000 more than it had paid. In October 1963 that $900,000 went to the Joseph Bulova School Trust.
In November 1963 the Internal Revenue Service proposed an assessment of $239,176.98 plus interest against Arde's estate, as a transferee of Orbis's assets, which had in turn come from Investors, for income taxes covering October 1 to November 30, 1957. The estate's position was that the school trust, which had received the money, should pay. That led to Henshel v. Guilden, in which Emily Bulova Henshel, an executrix of the estate and also a trustee of the school trust, sued her fellow executrix and fellow trustee Louise Guilden, along with the other trustees including Amzalak, for a declaration that the trust owed the tax. The same two women sat on both sides of the dispute, as executrices and as trustees, and the case was about whether a dead man's gift to injured veterans would carry his tax bill with it.
There was another case. On February 11, 1953, Arde had created a trust holding nothing but shares of Bulova Watch Company common stock, then listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1968 Louise Guilden, one of its five trustees, was in the Appellate Division against the other four. The surviving opinion begins counting the holding, "324,727," and the excerpt ends there.
None of this was unusual for a substantial American estate in the 1960s. Wills are contested, trusts deadlock, and the IRS follows money through shell companies. What stands out is how closely the litigation follows the way Arde lived. He worked through informal arrangements: an oral option, a sale with a condition attached, a prize promised before the event. Those arrangements served a living man who could explain them. Once he was dead, other people had to interpret them, and interpretation in an estate means lawyers. The note on the Eisenhower chronograph, no charge, courtesy of the factory, describes the kind of gesture Arde could make while alive. A will cannot make gestures. It can only be read.
The Hum
The best thing Arde Bulova's company ever made was a watch he never heard.
In 1950 a Swiss engineer named Max Hetzel, born in Basel, joined the Bulova Watch Company. Development of a new kind of timekeeper began in 1952, when Arde was still chairman. The design discarded the balance wheel and the mainspring, the regulating parts of every mechanical watch since the seventeenth century, and replaced them with a small tuning fork driven by a one-transistor oscillator, vibrating 360 times a second. It went on sale in October 1960, two and a half years after Arde's death. It was named Accutron.
It did not tick. It hummed, faintly and at a high pitch, so you could hear it if you held it to your ear. The company guaranteed it to within one minute a month, two seconds a day, far better than any mechanical watch of the time, and advertised it in Life and Ebony with a line that sounds like a mathematician wrote it after an exciting day: "so revolutionary — so accurate, it's the first timepiece in history that's guaranteed 99.9977 accurate on your wrist." An Accutron was buried in a time capsule at the 1964–65 New York World's Fair, in Queens, a few miles from the Woodside school. The Johnson administration used Accutrons as official gifts, which continued the habit of the engraved Eisenhower chronograph. Accutron mechanisms flew on Skylab, and one was left on the Moon at the Sea of Tranquility inside a seismometer that sent data back to Earth. By 1973 more than four million had been sold. The school's graduates were being trained to fix them.
Arde's nephew presided over the Accutron's success, and his record was mixed. Harry B. Henshel became president on his uncle's death. In 1960 he signed an agreement with Citizen Watch Co. of Japan to produce the Caravelle, a low-priced line at $10.95 to $29.95 aimed directly at Timex. It was the Westfield approach again, a second brand for a cheaper market, now built with a Japanese partner. Accutron sold for $125 and up. Time reported in 1967 that the company's combined sales in 1966 exceeded the total watch sales of either of its main American competitors, Elgin and Hamilton. In the late 1960s the Bulova brand claimed 55 percent of the U.S. market.
Then the technology Bulova had pioneered overtook it. The Accutron had been a first step toward the quartz watch, which also keeps time with a vibrating resonator but uses a crystal instead of a fork, more accurately and much more cheaply. A 1990s corporate history says Bulova's Accuquartz was the first quartz watch sold in the United States, in 1970, but the company did not market quartz successfully and did not build on the Accutron. It treated digital watches as a fad and did not launch a digital line until 1975, five years after Pulsar. The Computron, with its trapezoidal case and LED display angled toward a driver's eyes, came in 1976 and helped keep the company solvent for several years. The company reported a loss in 1975. Gulf and Western had already taken its stake in 1973 and sold it to Stelux in 1976. Henshel stepped down as chief executive in 1976 and stayed on as chairman. Universal Genève, bought in 1967, was sold in December 1977. Loews bought the company in 1979, took it private, and returned it to profit in the 1980s. The Bienne factory closed in 1983. Sometime in the late 1970s the records disappeared.
On January 10, 2008, Citizen Watch Co., the Japanese partner Harry Henshel had brought in for a cheap line forty-eight years earlier, bought the Bulova Watch Company from Loews for $250 million. Henshel did not see the sale. He kept an office at the company's headquarters in Woodside, on Bulova Avenue, long after the family had lost control, and he died at his home in Scarsdale on June 29, 2007, at eighty-eight. June 29 was his father's birthday. The family that had measured time so carefully ended its connection to the company on a date that matched the family's own calendar.
In 2014 the new owners stopped selling watches under the Accutron name. In 2020 they revived it as a separate brand and said they intended to develop a new version of the tuning-fork technology, while acknowledging that the industrial equipment used to make the original movements in the 1960s and 1970s no longer exists. The tooling, the factory, the archive, and the school are gone. The original watches are still around and still sold in the secondhand market, and they found a use no copywriter at Fifth Avenue would have predicted.
In Orthodox synagogues, the cantor needs a starting pitch before chanting. Most rabbis forbid striking a tuning fork on the Sabbath because it is too much like playing an instrument. A watch is not an instrument, and making a sound is not its main purpose. So some cantors wear old Accutrons. Before the service, a man in a prayer shawl raises his wrist to his ear and listens to a Swiss-designed fork in an American case, made by a company founded by a Jewish immigrant from Bohemia and now owned by Citizen of Japan, vibrating 360 times a second. The note is an F-sharp, slightly flat.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is a set of operating principles drawn from Arde Bulova's twenty-eight years as chairman and from the institutions he built, financed, or entangled. Some come from his successes, some from things that went wrong after him, and several from documents he never expected anyone to read, such as tax opinions, condemnation filings, and probate captions. The aim is to describe how Arde actually operated, which is more useful than the commemorative version.
The principles
- 1.Own the reference, not the product.
- 2.Buy the option on the hero before the hero exists.
- 3.Have the inventory ready before the event.
- 4.Standardize so that strangers can serve your customer.
- 5.Make the spectacle and the substance the same thing.
- 6.Borrow authority, and know what it costs.
- 7.Split prestige and price into separate brands.
- 8.Build philanthropy into the operating core.
- 9.Design for the person who cannot turn around.
- 10.Handshake deals don't survive their maker.
- 11.Fund the breakthrough, then fund what replaces it.
Principle 1
Own the reference, not the product
The 1926 radio spot did not describe a watch. It announced the hour and put the brand's name immediately before it, so listeners associated the brand with the correct time. The 1941 television spot went further and showed no watch at all, just a clock face with "Bulova Time" in one corner and a second hand moving for sixty seconds. Rival watchmakers competed on features. Bulova positioned itself as the authority those features were measured against.
A reference position is hard to dislodge because it doesn't depend on any single product. If a brand is where people go to find out what is true, each new product inherits that credibility. The observatory on the roof of 580 Fifth Avenue was the physical basis for the claim. The broadcasts spread it. By 1940, sponsoring all twenty of the top radio shows meant that in most American living rooms the hour came with Bulova's name attached.
There is a limit, and Bulova ran into it. A reference position lasts only as long as it is earned. When quartz offered better accuracy, Bulova's claim to be the authority on time no longer had the technology behind it.
Tactic: Find the standard your customers check everything against, whether that is the clock, the benchmark, or the index, and become the company that supplies it, not just one of the companies measured by it.
Principle 2
Buy the option on the hero before the hero exists
Arde offered his $1,000 transatlantic prize in 1926, a year before anyone made the flight. That changed the economics of the endorsement. Signing a celebrity after the triumph means paying market price for fame that already exists, and a competitor can always outbid you. Committing before the event means paying a fixed, small amount for a claim on whoever succeeds. When Lindbergh landed, the association was already Bulova's, and no rival could bid for it.
What makes this work is uncertainty about who will win, combined with confidence that someone will. Arde did not need to pick the pilot. He needed only to tie the brand to the achievement. The same reasoning ran through Bulova's other bets: the "President" model for a World Series winner in 1924, the Lady Lindy for Earhart in 1928, and much later a chronograph on Apollo 15 that ended up being worn on the Moon when the astronaut's issued Omega lost its crystal.
Tactic: Put a small, public, fixed-price commitment on an achievement you are sure will happen, before anyone knows who will achieve it.
Principle 3
Have the inventory ready before the event
The Lindbergh endorsement was worth something only because 5,000 Lone Eagle watches, packaged with his photograph, were on sale the day after he landed. They sold out in three days. Had the company spent those days designing the watch, it would have arrived after public attention had moved on. Ad copy can be written quickly. Manufacturing takes time and has to be done in advance.
This is the less glamorous half of Principle 2. Making the commitment is a marketing decision. Building the stock is an operations decision, and it means building it before the outcome is known, accepting that it might go unsold, because the payoff for being ready is much larger than the cost of being wrong. The nearly 50,000 Lone Eagles sold over the following years were the return on stock built on a guess.
Tactic: For any event you expect to profit from, build and position the product before the event and treat the cost of unsold stock as the price of being first.
Principle 4
Standardize so that strangers can serve your customer
The 1923 decision to machine every part to one ten-thousandth of an inch, so it fit every other Bulova, is usually told as a manufacturing story. Its biggest effect was on service. A watch with interchangeable parts could be repaired at any bench in the country by someone the company had never met. The brand's reliability no longer depended on its own workshop. It was spread across the whole network of independent repairmen.
The rest of Arde's career followed from that. Once standardization made repair possible anywhere, the business needed trained people to do it. The Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking supplied them, trained on Bulova calibers and eventually on the Accutron, with graduates guaranteed jobs in the jewelry trade. Seen that way, the school was the last stage of a supply chain that began with a machining tolerance in Bienne.
Tactic: Design your product so that people outside your company can maintain it, then invest in training those people, because they are part of what customers experience as your reliability.
Principle 5
Make the spectacle and the substance the same thing
The observatory on top of 580 Fifth Avenue was a publicity stunt, and it was also real equipment. A mathematician took sidereal readings, which were recorded electrically on a chronograph hundreds of feet below and used by the Setting and Timing unit to regulate actual watches. Nobody could fairly call it hollow, because it was in use, and nobody could say it lacked showmanship, because it was a watch company's observatory on a Manhattan skyscraper.
Most companies keep marketing and engineering in separate departments that resent each other. Bulova's best moves joined them. The clock radio of 1928 combined the device that announced the time with the device that kept it. The Accutron's hum was a technical side effect that became a selling point, "the hushed hum of Accutron," as the 1961 Life advertisement put it. When the thing being shown off is also the thing doing the work, skeptics have little to attack.
Tactic: Look for the part of your operation that is impressive in itself, put it where customers can see it, and stop paying for publicity that has no connection to how you actually work.
Arde's company gathered authority wherever it could: a watch presented by Coolidge, an engraved chronograph for Eisenhower, Omar Bradley as board chairman for sixteen years, the Academy Awards. In 1949 or 1950 Bulova licensed the words "Academy Award" and "Oscar" and the statuette's image, and from 1950 through 1954 it issued more than 25 women's models and 14 men's under the license, paying $154,000 in fees.
That kind of authority carries obligations and has to be watched. In 1952 the Federal Trade Commission required Bulova and the Academy to make clear that the Oscar connection came from a licensing deal and not from any "meritorious award made on the basis of comparative tests with other watches." The connection to the government also came with political commitments: the company "passionately supported" Eisenhower's higher tariff on imported watches while its own movements were Swiss-made.
★
The Authority Ledger
What Bulova borrowed, what it gave, and what came back.
| Source of authority | What Bulova gave | What came back |
|---|---|---|
| Charles Lindbergh, 1927 | $1,000 prize, a watch | Testimonial telegram; ~50,000 Lone Eagles sold |
| President Coolidge, 1924 | A watch for Bucky Harris | The "President" model |
| Gen. Eisenhower, 1940s | Engraved 1941 chronograph | Proximity; later, a tariff Bulova supported |
| Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1950–54 | $154,000 in licensing fees | 39+ Oscar models; an FTC stipulation in 1952 |
| Gen. Omar Bradley, 1958–73 | The chairmanship | Sixteen years of borrowed gravitas |
Tactic: Before you borrow another institution's prestige, write down what it will cost you in disclosures, positions you will have to take, and reputation, and accept those costs only if you would agree to them openly.
Principle 7
Split prestige and price into separate brands
In 1927, the year Bulova was associating itself with Lindbergh, it also trademarked Westfield, a cheaper line with lower jewel counts, plainer cases and straps, and Swiss movements different from the flagship's. The two lines did not share movements. The arrangement let Bulova sell to buyers who could not afford the main brand without making the main brand look cheaper.
Arde's successor used the same structure in 1960, when Harry Henshel's agreement with Citizen produced the Caravelle at $10.95 to $29.95 to compete with Timex, while the Accutron went for $125 and up. By 1966 the combined lines outsold Elgin and Hamilton. Keeping the brands separate meant each could do its own job: the flagship kept its prices and reputation, and the second line competed on price.
The arrangement had a long-term cost the company could not have foreseen. The partner brought in for the budget line in 1960 bought the whole company in 2008.
Tactic: When you go after a cheaper market, do it under a separate name, and pay attention to what your manufacturing partner for that line learns about your business.
Principle 8
Build philanthropy into the operating core
The Joseph Bulova School was charity in the full sense. It was tuition-free, offered rehabilitation and physical therapy, and helped found wheelchair sports in America. It was also tied closely to the business. It produced skilled watchmakers for an industry that was losing them, trained them on Bulova movements, placed them in the jewelry stores that sold Bulova watches, and added a Precision Technician Course in 1958 when industry needs changed. The Veterans Administration asked Bulova to run training inside hospitals like Walter Reed.
That connection is why the school lasted decades after its founder died. Philanthropy that runs alongside a business tends to be cut in a bad year. Philanthropy that does something the business needs gets protected. Norman Morris's pledge in the mid-1990s made the case in labor-market terms: the trade needed craftsmen and young people weren't entering it.
Tactic: Find the shortage your industry will face over the next ten years and fund a public-spirited effort to fix it, so that the generosity and the business interest support each other.
Principle 9
Design for the person who cannot turn around
The Woodside building had an elevator with doors on opposite sides "so that a man need not turn his wheel chair around to get out," entrance doors that opened by electric eye, ramps in place of thresholds, and cork floors to prevent skidding. No law required any of it. Someone designed around the most constrained person who would use the building, and the result worked better for everyone.
This is the same discipline as the 1923 machining standard applied to people. Bulova's best decisions came from taking the hardest requirement as the starting point: tight tolerances, a guarantee of two seconds a day, a doorway a wheelchair can use without maneuvering. Designing for the extreme case pushes out the ordinary compromises. The phrase "so that a man need not turn his wheel chair around" is a specification and also a statement about dignity.
Tactic: Define your product around the user who has the hardest time with it, and then see how much easier it has become for everyone else.
Principle 10
Handshake deals don't survive their maker
On August 17, 1944, Arde orally granted a candidate's wife an option on his personal Bulova stock as the "clincher" in a recruitment. It worked, and twelve years later it produced a tax court opinion. His sale of Investors Inter-Continental stock in 1957 included a condition benefiting the school that, after his death, led to a $239,176.98 IRS assessment and a lawsuit between his own executrices. His widow's waiver of her elective share went to the Appellate Division. His 1953 stock trust ended with one trustee in court against the other four.
Informal arrangements are fast and personal, and they let a founder act on instinct. They work only while the founder is alive to explain what he meant. Afterward, intentions have to be reconstructed from documents, usually by lawyers. Arde ran a public company with a shopkeeper's habits, and the cost came due in probate.
⚖
The Chairman's Instruments, in Court
Arde Bulova's informal arrangements and where they ended up.
1942
The U.S. condemns a leasehold on Arde's 5.741 Flushing acres; the rent is litigated through August 9, 1943.
1944
Oral stock option to Rose Kane, the "clincher" for her husband's hire, granted August 17.
1953
Trust of Bulova common stock created February 11.
1956
Kane v. Commissioner decided in the U.S. Tax Court.
1957
Investors Inter-Continental stock sold to Orbis for $1,100,000, with any surplus pledged to the school.
1958
Arde dies March 18; will probated May 2.
1961
Widow's appeal of her waived elective share decided October 24.
1963
$900,000 reaches the school trust; IRS proposes a $239,176.98 assessment.
1968
In re Bulova Fund: one trustee against four in the Appellate Division.
Tactic: Every few years, ask whether a stranger with only your documents could carry out your intentions, and write down whatever they couldn't.
Principle 11
Fund the breakthrough, then fund what replaces it
Max Hetzel joined in 1950 and Accutron development began in 1952, both under Arde. The watch reached the market in 1960, after his death. It sold more than four million units, flew on Skylab, and sat on the Moon. It was the most important product in the company's history, and it was paid for by a chairman who never sold one.
What came next is the warning. The Accutron's tuning fork was a first step toward quartz, and the company did not take the next step. It failed to market quartz successfully, dismissed digital watches as a fad, and launched its digital line five years after Pulsar. It lost money in 1975 and went through three owners in six years. The next-generation research Arde funded became the new core business, and nobody funded the generation after it with the same conviction. A company that had made its name by being first lost its position because it stopped trying to be.
⏱
Who Owned the Hour
Bulova's control, from founder to foreign parent.
| Period | Control | Phase |
|---|---|---|
| 1875–1936 | Joseph Bulova | Founding |
| 1930–1958 | Arde Bulova, chairman | Scale |
| 1958–1976 | Harry B. Henshel, president (Bradley chairman to 1973) | Peak, then drift |
| 1973–1979 | Gulf and Western, then Stelux | Instability |
| 1979–2008 | Loews Corporation | Recovery |
| 2008–present | Citizen Watch Co., for $250 million | Heritage |
Tactic: On the same day you commit money to the breakthrough that will define your company, set aside a smaller budget for the technology most likely to make that breakthrough obsolete.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Arde Bulova, engraved on the caseback of a 1941 chronograph presented to Gen. Dwight D. EisenhowerTo Genl. Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a token of my admiration and respect.
— Cornerstone motto, Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking, 1945To Serve Those Who Served Us.
— Joseph Bulova School of Watchmaking Training Manual, Twelfth Edition, 1980Mr. Arde Bulova was one of the rare men of vision who wanted to combine his love and insistence for perfection in craftsmanship with his desire to aid men in finding a useful vocation.
— Bulova radio announcement, 1926At the tone, it's 8 P.M., B-U-L-O-V-A, Bulova watch time.
— Note returned with the Eisenhower chronograph after servicing, 1970sNo charge, courtesy of the factory.
Maxims
- Announce the hour, not the watch. The brand that defines the standard is harder to replace than any product measured against it.
- Price the hero before the flight. A small fixed commitment made before the outcome is known is cheaper than any endorsement bought afterward.
- Ship the day after. An endorsement is only worth what you have in stock when the public is paying attention.
- Tolerances are a form of trust. Parts made to one ten-thousandth of an inch let strangers keep your promises to customers.
- Put the observatory on the roof. The best publicity is equipment that is actually doing work.
- Borrowed authority has to be repaid. Generals, presidents, and the Oscars all came with obligations.
- Give a cheaper line its own name. Separate brands let the flagship hold its price while the second brand competes.
- Make the gift serve the business. Philanthropy that fills a real need in the business is the kind that lasts.
- Design the door so no one has to turn around. Solve for the most constrained user and everyone else benefits.
- Write it down. Handshake deals end up being interpreted by lawyers after you're gone.
