Harry Bulova Henshel, who died Friday at 88, led the Bulova Watch Co. to new heights — and even to the lunar landscape, where moonwalkers placed an Accutron mechanism in the Sea of Tranquility in 1969 — in his two decades leading the family firm.

But exchange rates, manufacturing problems, and the unanticipated advent of the digital watch squelched profits in the late 1970s, and after Bulova became a takeover target Henshel ceased direct involvement in the company’s operations.

Famous for its luxury wristwatches and other timepieces, the New York jewelry company J. Bulova began manufacturing watches in 1911 under its founder, Henshel’s grandfather. A pioneer of advertising, it was an early radio sponsor of shows such as Charlie McCarthy and Jack Benny, and distributed free clocks to stations in exchange for on-air mentions of the brand name. It maintained an observatory atop company headquarters at 580 Fifth Ave., where an astronomer was in charge of divining the precise time by observing the heavens. The company had a manufacturing facility in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Henshel joined the company after World War II and eventually ran its research division. He held at least two patents for wristwatch clasps and helped develop the company’s Phototimer, used to measure speeds at track and field events to the millisecond.

In 1959, he was named president of the firm, and the next year he introduced Bulova’s most successful product to date, the Accutron, which the company billed as the first revolution in clock technology in centuries. Instead of using springs and gears to establish the basic rate of time, it used an electronically vibrated tuning fork. Accuracy was guaranteed to within two seconds a day. Within two years, the company was selling more than $10 million worth annually, Henshel told the Wall Street Journal. He expanded the company’s manufacturing facilities in Switzerland and rationalized the autocratic management style his uncle, Ardé Bulova, had used.

Throughout the 1960s, Bulova prospered as its smartly designed Accutron watch appeared on such television programs as “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and was named the White House’s official gift of state by President Johnson, according to a company history. The placement of the Accutron mechanism on the moon, where it regulated data transmission from remote sensing instruments, was the latest in a long relationship the company had with the American space program, dating from the 1950s. Bulova also had a substantial business manufacturing bomb fuses, and it cemented its ties to the defense community by appointing General Omar Bradley as chairman in 1954.

The rise of Timex in the late 1950s, with its low-priced wristwatches, was an early challenge for Henshel, one that he met by introducing a lower-priced line called Caravelle that featured jeweled movements. But the introduction of the first digital watch, the Pulsar, in 1970, seemed to blindside him; for several years, the company acted as if digital watches were a fad. Problems mounted as the exchange rate for Swiss francs ballooned by 40% between 1971 and 1975, which killed profits for a company that manufactured abroad but sold mainly domestically. But it was still the dominant brand in high-end watches and enjoyed an 8% share of the national market overall.

In 1973, with profits declining, Gulf & Western Industries Inc. purchased a 29% share. When it failed to turn things around quickly, it sold out to a Hong Kong watch manufacturing company, Stelux Manufacturing Co., in 1976, which replaced Henshel as chief executive, but to no avail. In 1979, Loews Corp. bought Stelux’s share and eventually took the company private. After tightening up quality control and lopping off a large slice of upper management, Loews saw the company return to profitability. The company is still a division of Loews.

“He had a good winning streak,” the president of the company in the 1980s, Andrew Tisch, said. “He took a company that was really great and kept it going as a powerhouse.”

After his firm was acquired, Henshel kept a seat on the board until he retired, and he kept an office at Bulova’s Woodside headquarters for the rest of his life.

He raised and raced thoroughbreds under the colors of his Brown Villa Farms stables in New York and Florida. A large Magritte dominates the living room at his home in Scarsdale, showing a bucolic seaside scene. Shining above, instead of the moon, is a full Earth.

Harry Bulova Henshel
Born February 5, 1919, in New York City; died June 29 at his home in Scarsdale; survived by his wife, Joy Altman, daughters Dayle, Patti, Diane, and Judy, and four grandchildren.