Everyone knows what a quartz watch is. In fact, quartz watches are so common these days, that we don’t even bother to notice them anymore. They are probably the most popular form of watch in the world and possibly, most of us have owned a quartz watch at some point in our lives. Even the most poorest people in the world have heard of them and most likely, they may owned one.
These watches are so common today that we tend to forget their significance. Despite the fact that we are wearing them all the time, people don’t really know much about how quartz watches helped to revolutionize the watch industry. Like mobile phones, quartz watches have become such a common place, we don’t even bother to understand their place as a major breakthrough in technology.
Quartz (also called electronic) watches have few or no moving parts. Essentially, all modern quartz watches use the piezoelectric effect in a tiny quartz crystal to provide a stable time base for a mostly electronic movement. The quartz crystal behaves as an oscillator which resonates at a specific and high stable frequency, which can be used to accurately pace a timekeeping mechanism. This discovery is known to be the most important in the watch making history. The crystal is small enough to be used in wristwatches, yet also incredibly powerful.
Today, most quartz movements are primarily electronic but are geared to drive mechanical hands on the face of the watch in order to provide a traditional analog display of the time, which is still preferred by most consumers. But the original quartz watches were a little different, with big, bright red digits and without all the features of a modern watches.
The first electronic quartz watches were made by the CEH research laboratory in Switzerland in 1962. The first quartz watch to enter production was the Seiko 35 SQ Astron, which appeared in 1969. When the quartz watches first came in to the marketplace in the seventies they were unsurprisingly expensive, retailing in the USA at $500. At that time, it was the newness that made them attractive. Over time, after the liquid crystal displays were invented, the LSD light displaying the time was toned down to what we know today as the black digits.
There are significant differences in the accuracy of the quartz watches, but the difference is much smaller than that found between mechanical movements and quartz movements. Quartz watches, even in their most inexpensive forms, are an order of magnitude more accurate than purely mechanical ones. Whereas mechanical watches can typically be off by several seconds a day, an inexpensive quartz movement in a child’s wristwatch may still be accurate to within 500 milliseconds per day, that is ten times more accurate than a mechanical movement.
It is easy today to disregard the quartz watch as something that is just there. Perhaps, with the introduction of mobile phones that not only tell the time, but can be used to communicate, play games and listen music, the quartz watch is losing its significance. But this remarkable invention was a major breakthrough in technology. Without this technology, today’s society just wouldn’t be the same. Remember this next time you see a quartz watch!
The author is a regular writer for Articleated.com and webmaster at Good Time Watches, a site that carry watches and ALLdigitALL Computers & Electronics, a computer and consumer electronics oriented site.
Tags: Quartz, quartz watches, quartz wristwatches, tim, watch industry, watches, wrist watch, wristwatches