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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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.
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