Bulova
manufacturer of watches and clocks

Bulova is an American timepiece manufacturing company that was founded in 1875 in New York City. Formally the Bulova Watch Company, it makes watches, clocks and accessories.
History
Founding
Bulova was founded and incorporated as the J. Bulova Company in 1875 by Bohemian-Jewish immigrant Joseph Bulova. It was reincorporated under the name Bulova Watch Company in 1923, became part of the Loews Corporation in 1979, and was sold to Citizen at the end of 2007.
Bulova started a small jewelry shop in New York City around 1875 on Maiden Lane, which specialized in jewelry and the repair of clocks and the occasional pocket watch. Around 1911, Bulova began producing table clocks and pocket watches. In 1912, Joseph Bulova launched his first plant dedicated entirely to the production of watches in Biel, Switzerland where he began a standardized mass production. The watches were popular with the American public. In 1927, Bulova set up an observatory on the roof of a skyscraper located at 580 Fifth Avenue to determine universal time precisely.
Bulova established its operations in Woodside, New York, and Flushing, New York, where it made innovations in watchmaking, and developed a number of watchmaking tools.
The public source identifies “Bulova” as manufacturer of watches and clocks. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bulova, manufacturer and watches.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q663300. VIAF identifies the subject as 149333974. The Library of Congress control number is no2010050619. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1875, 1923, 1979 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bulova” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.