how do quartz powered watches work?
In: Engineering
Quartz is a special type of material. It’s a crystal that changes shape when you put an electric current though it, and generates an electric current when you change its shape.
What they do in a watch is they use it like a tuning fork. When you hit a tuning fork it vibrates at a very specific frequency. So they “hit” the tiny quartz crystal inside the watch with some electricity then “listen” to it vibrating by the electricity it products.
Because it is vibrating at a specific frequency they can count the vibrations. Most watches have crystals tuned to 32768 Hz, so when they have counted 332768 vibrations it means exactly 1 second has passed.
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