By comparison, a self-winding watch at that time contained around 136 parts, 26 of them moving,“ explains Pieter Doensen. „Caliber 214 reduces the number of parts to a mere 27 of which only 12 were moving parts. Accutron changed the principle and made the balance wheel redundant. The Hamilton 500 had a coil fixed on the balance. The Bulova Accutron print ad from 1963 sells the „Astronaut as so accurate and versatile that it makes even the finest watches – even electric watches – obsolete.“ Accutron ended that era,“ says a headline across half the entire page promoting the new Bulova Accutron. „For 300 years the most precise time was kept by a balance wheel. It took only three years before Bulova introduced the Accutron in 1960.
The race for the first electric watch was in full swing after WWII with Hamilton grabbing first place. The low frequency of the balance wheel made it challenging to improve the accuracy of the mechanical watches. All that changed one evening when I opened the History of a modern wrist watch book by Pieter Doensen on a page that featured the copy of a tuning fork Swiss Patent 312290. It was on the list for sure, but I failed multiple times to find a few hours to dig deeper into its story. I have seen so many Accutron Spaceview models that it resulted in pushing it lower and lower on my wishlist. What a mistake! Well, a mistake you can avoid. Even finer models such as the Bulova Accutron Astronaut. So many Bulova Accutron watches up for grabs cause the effect that collectors tend to overlook them quickly.
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