About
In 1920, Bulova moved to 580 Fifth Avenue, where it engaged in the ambitious project of building the first observatory to ever be constructed on the top of a skyscraper. Ambitious because, although it was now high above the heat radiation levels of the ground which disturb optical clarity in telescopes, it would be subject to the movement of the building. This oscillation in tall buildings is necessary to maintain the integrity of the structure against the forces of nature. Much technical evaluation had to be done to mitigate the natural movement of the building but eventually the observatory was taking highly precise readings of the speed of rotation of the earth, the measurement of sidereal time. In conjunction with the quartz clock at the Bell Laboratories, it was eventually determined that the earth did not rotate at a uniform speed; the definition of the second was fatally flawed, it meant nothing. We now needed a new definition for the fundamental unit of time. It would be another forty years before the world accepted that new definition.
In the early days of watch making, for Bulova as with other manufacturers, the individual components of a watch movement were all made by hand. Each watch was built individually with many adjustments and corrections being made to the components as they were being assembled and tested. The process was time consuming and costly, not only during the manufacturing phase but also afterwards, for maintenance and repair. If a watch needed a new part, it had to be hand crafted and refined to fit the individual watch under repair. This not only added to the cost of manufacture but also made the after sales servicing of watches very expensive and time consuming.
Following on with the company’s pioneering and innovative spirit, which was to become its culture, in 1923, Bulova perfected a new technique in watch manufacturing, the standardization of all parts. Because each part was now built to an exacting specification of within one ten thousandth of an inch, the parts could be freely interchanged with any other Bulova watch of the same model. Bulova had driven a revolution in the watch industry, the rapid and low cost manufacturing, servicing and repair of watches. Other watch making companies quickly tried to change their manufacturing processes in competition with Bulova, but they were too late, Bulova was already ahead and now unstoppable.