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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If you put a bit of electricity into a quartz crystal, it vibrates. When it vibrates, it sends back its own bit of electricity. This is called piezoelectricity. If you make it the right shape, you can get it pretty precise. You can also make it vibrate with a frequency that is a power of 2, which means the circuit that counts those vibrations is super simple and inexpensive. This process also uses very little energy, so a small battery can last a long time.
All this meant clocks could be easier to make, smaller, more accurate, more precise, and cheaper.
just to add to the other answers here, personally i love mechanical timekeeping and find it incredibly interesting and satisfying, but the quartz technology is just on another level of awesome clever sciency-ness
When a current is applied to it vibrates at an extremely consistent frequency, which is what you need for accurate time keeping, a consistent frequency of something. Springs have to be wound up regularly and can change their springiness as temperature changes, pendulum clocks are fairly consistent but won’t keep consistent time on a boat. Quartz vibrating also isn’t really affected by outside factors
Imagine an old grandfather clock, one with a pendulum inside it.
Let’s say that every 2 seconds it completes a cycle (a tick and a tock). That way, the clock completes a cycle and knows that 2 seconds have passed.
It is however really hard getting an accurate measurement using that. If you have the clock resting on a moving surface like a table or a ship, that will effect the length of each cycle. If you make the pendulum longer, that will effect the length of the cycle. If the wind blows or the atmosphere changes, that would effect the length of a cycle. Some things effect the clock by tiny amounts but some by larger however everything can cause a problem.
Quartz, when electricity flows through it will vibrate at a consistent speed. This means that a lot of issues you would get with older clocks which could make them less accurate could be removed as they are less effected by where they are.
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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