Watchlords

At the end of 1959, in anticipation of the launch of a revolutionary new line of watches called Accutron, Bulova designers and craftsmen created tooling that imprinted dial markings on some of the new Accutron plastic crystals. The printed crystal carried all of the information that would normally be found on an Accutron dial. This allowed Bulova to eliminate the dial from several models of the new watches and install a printed crystal, thus exposing the tuning fork and the green colored circuitry inside. Because ordinary plated hands didn't provide enough contrast against the movement to be easily seen from a distance, Bulova used white painted luminous handsets as replacements. The converted watches were only intended to be used as sales aids in order to showcase the revolutionary Accutron tuning fork movement.1963 National Geographic Ad

Accutron was introduced to the public in October of 1960. Conversion kits and display watches were made available to Bulova dealers worldwide to help them explain how the breakthrough technology worked.

The marketing group at Bulova correctly decided that top-of-the-line solid gold cases would convey a sense of enduring quality to the upstart Accutron technology, so Bulova used two 14 kt. gold "Spaceviewed" models in an advertising campaign which was intended to accomplish two things. The 1963 Saturday Evening Post Adidea was to differentiate and create excitement around Accutron's ordinary looking dial models by giving the public a glimpse at the technology inside, and to link the development program which created Accutron to the US space program. The advertising worked brilliantly.

The plan was to build enough of these unusual watches for distribution to dealers who didn't want to bother with converting one from their stock and it is widely believed that Bulova expected to sell at most, a few hundred of the new "Display Model" sales aids to their dealers. That was the plan but the public had other ideas.

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