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.
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Quartz crystal has a property called piezoelectric: if you compress it, it will output current. Inversely, if you run the right current through it, it will vibrate.
Scales and clocks used to rely on gear trains, but engineers managed to harness quartz to replace them in electronic scales and electronic watches.
In an electronic scale, you compress a quartz crystal, and the current output is measured to determine the mass of what is applying pressure.
In an electronic clock (or watch), the current makes the crystal hum at a stable frequency that changes a bit depending on temperature, but not that much to make measurements impossible.
That was the easy part. The hard part was to design a circuitry that could take the humming of the crystal and break it down into one second.
The first quartz clocks used bulbs and filled an entire car spot. The invention of the transistor and the gradual miniaturisation of transistor boards allowed to reduce the size of the whole thing to: a double door fridge, a washing machine, a suitcase, a pack of cigarettes. And ultimately a few coins stacked on top of each other.
A lot of these timekeepers were hand made, but the level of detailing required industrial methods, which would also allow to drastically reduce cost and scale up to mass production.
This is why electronic scales and electronic watches are significantly cheaper Thant their fully mechanical ancestors.
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