How exactly is it that quartz crystal led to such a massive growth in our time-keeping ability?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.