Bulova
BLACKOUT MOON WATCH 98A186
A unique piece of space history
Admittedly for most people, a watch you could wear if you went to the moon isn’t the most immediately practical feature of a timepiece, but for Colonel David Scott, a Nasa astronaut embarking on the fourth manned lunar landing, it was invaluable. The watch he wore on 2 August 1971, specially customised for lunar conditions, precisely tracked time and ensured that no one in the crew ran out of oxygen, water or battery power in their life-support-system backpacks. It’s an iconic timepiece and one that peerless New York watchmaker Bulova has paid tribute to with a beautiful 2017 update.
“The Bulova Blackout Moon Watch is a revival variant of the original specially designed one-of-a-kind Bulova worn on the Apollo 15 mission,” says Robert Christiano, Bulova’s executive vice-president of global marketing. “We updated this watch to offer our high performance quartz movement with unparalleled accuracy in an historic design.” Indeed, visually, the Blackout Moon Watch offers a flawless homage to the iconic original, a retro-futuristic tool watch in stainless steel, with a monochrome dial complete with calendar, tachymeter and three sub-dials — 60 minutes, running seconds and 1/10th second.
The inner workings, however, are entirely modern; Bulova has powered the watch with its Precisionist quartz movement, heralded as the most accurate in the world. The movement adds a third prong to a standard two-pronged quartz crystal — the extra prong resulting in eight times the vibrational frequency of a traditional quartz movement, and creating a chronograph with a continuously sweeping second hand, accurate to 10 seconds per year as opposed to 15 seconds per month on other watches.
Founded in New York by Bohemian immigrant Joseph Bulova in 1875, the Bulova Watch Company has long cultivated an association with aviation and adventuring. Ardé Bulova, son of Joseph, offered $1,000 and a Bulova watch to the first pilot to successfully complete a nonstop transatlantic flight and in 1927 the prizes were claimed by Charles Lindbergh after flying from New York to Paris. It’s a pioneering spirit that led, perhaps inevitably, to exploring outer space.
“The story around it, that legacy and history, is why the Moon Watch is so important,” says Mark Toulson, head of watch buying at luxury retailer Aurum Holdings. “The story around it has become legendary. Omega was the watch of Nasa at the time, but the crystal popped off Dave Scott’s Speedmaster, so he wore his Bulova. It was the first time Nasa used the electric lunar roving vehicle, so you could say it was the first watch that ever drove on the moon.”
“Bulova’s legendary engineering expertise was tapped by Nasa to help with the US space efforts,” explains Christiano. “That partnership led to 46 missions together, from 1960 into the Seventies.” Central to this partnership was Bulova’s Accutron movement, a precursor to the Precisionist, and the world’s first electronic watch; it kept time using a 360Hz tuning fork, powered by a one-transistor electronic oscillator circuit. After its release in 1960, Accutron technology was used in all Nasa’s instrument panel clocks and timekeeping mechanisms.
With the Blackout Moon Watch, the pioneering spirit of Joseph Bulova and son lives on. “Bulova is driven by the same core principles of craftsmanship, innovation and technology that guided our visionary founder over 140 years ago. He broke boundaries and created his own rules to deliver the exceptional,” says Christiano. “We are inspired by the examples he set to this day, drawing on our heritage with the archive collection while driving innovation.” Design-wise, those innovations include the Blackout version of the watch [pictured]. “It’s matte black, and it’s got a black Nato strap with the original logo — that sleek, stealth look,” Toulson says.
While true moon watch completists might wish to seek out Scott’s original timepiece — last seen at private auction in 2015, when it sold for $1.62m (£1.26m) — most everyone else will be more than satisfied with the Blackout Moon Watch, which is every bit as handsome (and, whisper it, considerably more accurate). As Christiano says, “It gives our customers the opportunity to own a little piece of space history.”
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