Every video I see on some introduction to time-keeping history says things changed when quartz was discovered. I remember commercials for watches actually bragging in marketing campaigns about quartz time-keeping or whatever it is called. I don’t know what about quartz (is it an element) made it so important for keeping accurate time.
Also, I wasn’t sure what flair to put this under. I can add another if someone has a better suggestion.
In: 89
Prior to the discovery of the peizo-electric properties of quartz, any timepiece required very complex gears, and relied on a spring to provide the power to the mechanism (sometimes a weight).
As the spring unwound it would provide less power, and therefore not be as accurate.
It quartz it is peizo-electric, meaning it creates a small electrical charge when struck. What this *also* means is that if you give it a slight electrical charge it will vibrate. It vibrates at a fairly regular interval provided you keep giving it power. This vibration can be used as a measurement of time. Not only does this allow more accurate time keeping, but is a far simpler and cheaper design
A mechanical watch needs to be extremely precisely by manufacturers to get anything remotely accurate. The actual timekeeping part of the watch is a circular spring that coils and uncoils periodically, once a second. The more controlled this spring is, the more accurate. You can think of this as a slinky that bounces up and down (spins, in a real watch). You have to engineer the slinky in a way so that it bounces once exactly each second. A great mechanical watch loses or gains time about 2 seconds per day, so your slinky has to bounce between 0.9998 and 1.0002 times per second. Of course, any tiny imperfections in the rest of the watch, gears, bearings etc would create error as well.
In a quartz watch on the other hand, is electrical. The quartz crystal used in an electrical circuit is what produces the “bouncing” or oscillating effect. This happens at an extremely precise frequency, at exactly 32768 times per second. A circuit then counts the number of pulses, and when it reaches 32768, it uses a motor to push the watch one second forward. This means the timekeeping part of the watch has essentially no moving parts, it’s all done electrically, making a quartz watch extremely accurate.
Quartz isn’t an element, but a mineral that demonstrates what’s known as *piezoelectricity*. That is, when you run a current through it, it vibrates at a very specific frequency. That vibration can be harnessed with a watch mechanism and is more precise than older styles of clock.
If you want to keep time, you need to use something that is already known to behave regularly.
That’s why people originally used the sun, moon, and stars to keep time. Sure, over centuries they shift slightly. But on the scale of a human life, they’re extremely regular:
– A cycle of the Sun rising and setting is called a day.
– A cycle of the Moon waxing and waning is called a month.
– A cycle of the seasons (the shifting of the sunset and sunrise; days getting longer and shorter) is called a year.
That’s why we have these concepts at all. A year is only 365 days long, because we live in a solar system where these cycles relate like that. If we lived in a different solar system, we’d have different days and years. If we had no Moon, we’d probably have no months at all.
What if you want to keep time on a very small scale? Not years or months, but seconds, or even less.
There’s no easy “natural” way to do that: no moon orbits the Earth once every second, for example. Newton used his own heartbeat, but that’s not exactly stable if we want to measure seconds for months or years.
It can be done, using some very complex mechanisms and clockwork: that’s what traditional clocks did. That only becomes less accurate over time, which is kinda the opposite of what we want: something that behaves regularly.
But then we discovered something: if you sent electricity through quartz, the quartz vibrates at a very regular, tiny interval.
We can use this very tiny “cycle” as a way to keep track of very small units of time.
Like we used the cycles of the Sun and Moon to keep track of large portions of time, like days and years.
How does a Rolex work, and if they’re not piezo electric are they less efficient? If so is the only appeal brand name? Like diamonds, a false commodity?
IIRC from my courses of physics, the “old” way to keep time, was to keep a fraction of the tropical year 1900. However, this was unprecise and could, on longer time periods, have massive implications.
Quartz crystal is much better because they use it’s natural oscillation frequency (when subjected to electrical current) as a time standard. According to calculations, it’s much more precise than the old way. And compared to a standard pendulum for example, the quartz crystal is more precise because a pendulum has all kinds of gears and mechanics in it to function. The more “complex” such a system is, the more probability that there’s a deviation. For civil time keeping it’s good enough. I mean who gives a shit if your clock is a few seconds behind mine right? But for science, which often requires really precise measurements, it’s a different story and more precision was needed.
Quartz crystal oscillations intervals are fairly regular in comparison and thus, much less deviations. It’s a simple setup and thus, less chances of deviations happening somewhere along the way.
Even more precise is the atomic clock, but that’s a different story.
Quartz crystals have the ability to vibrate at a very precise and stable frequency, which makes them ideal for use in timekeeping devices. The first quartz clock was developed in the late 1920s, and over the following decades, quartz technology was refined and improved upon, leading to the widespread adoption of quartz clocks and watches.
One of the key advantages of quartz timekeeping is that it is much more accurate than mechanical timekeeping, which relies on the movement of gears and springs. Quartz clocks can be accurate to within a few seconds per year, while mechanical clocks are typically accurate to within a few minutes per day.
In addition to their accuracy, quartz clocks and watches are also relatively inexpensive to produce and maintain, which has contributed to their widespread use. Today, quartz technology is used in a wide range of timekeeping devices, including wristwatches, wall clocks, and even some computers.
You’re getting a lot of “quartz crystals vibrate at very precise frequencies.” While true, this isn’t the most important thing. A tuning fork vibrates at a very precise frequency. It’s how piano tuners do their job. You can count the vibrations that occur, and then say “this much time has passed.” Notice I did not say “count how many vibrations happen in a certain amount of time.” I said “count the vibrations and say this much time has passed.” You use the fork as a standard. Why don’t we just use a steel fork and call it good?
Well, the tone made by the fork rapidly dies off, so you have to hit it again. In addition, you need some way to count the vibrations. Electric circuits allow you to do this, and you can come up with a system where a tiny, electrically driven hammer hits the fork and you use some electric property to count the vibrations. Maybe make the fork magnetic and put the tines near a coil. This will let you get a signal similar to the way we generate a lot of our electric power. The issue is, this is going to be a large piece of equipment. Timex would like something you can carry in your pocket or wear on your wrist. They also want it to be cheap. Enter quartz.
Quartz is a type of rock (really a mineral that is basically sand) that has an interesting property. If you squeeze it, like in a clamp, it makes a small electrical voltage difference across its length and can push a very tiny electric current. This is how the push button igniters on gas grills work. The ‘ka-chunk’ sound is a mechanism that squeezes a piece of quartz with a very large pressure to make a spark, then releases that pressure. What’s useful about this property, though, is it runs the other way. If you apply a voltage difference across the quartz’s length, you can make it shrink a little bit, just as if you squeezed it.
[Make your tuning fork out of quartz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuning_fork#In_clocks_and_watches) (Wikipedia link). Instead of using a hammer, “hit” it with an electrical signal. This will cause it to vibrate, generating an electrical signal at the frequency of the fork. Clever circuit design will let you use this signal to drive the hammer so you hit the fork at the right time to make its vibration bigger, giving you a stronger signal to measure. The feedback creates a self-resonant circuit. Self-resonant circuits come in many varieties. (This is electro-mechanical, but things like a Colpitts or Hartely oscillator or tunnel diode oscillator are entirely electrical and can be built with very few components.)
Quartz is a stable material, meaning it doesn’t react with many things under typical conditions. You don’t have to worry about it rusting which would change the way it vibrates. Making the fork small limits issues that may arise if you tip it one way or the other due to the weight of the tines causing them to bend. If you want a very accurate signal you do need to worry about temperature differences. Since things expand and contract with temperature changes, the vibration of the quartz fork varies with temperature. High quality frequency counters have an oven option that maintains the quartz standard at a fixed temperature to provide improved stability.
Does this help clarify things?
When electricity is passed through quartz, it basically vibrates at a neatly perfect interval. You can then using a computer to count how many times it does it in a given period, and you create a new standard for how long a “second” is. Then you change everything to measure based on the new standard.
These days the standard is based on the nuclear properties of some atom, I forget which, but is even more accurate. You may have heard of the term, “atomic clock”. But quartz is accurate enough for all but the most precise scientific measurements.
All you need to keep time is find some phenomena that repeats very periodically and measure it repeatedly. There are lots of things in nature that do this, like pendulums swinging, but they’re difficult to stick inside of a wrist watch.
Quartz crystals are just one random thing that oscillate very regularly when you a voltage across them. Ezpz to stick into a watch.
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