Quartz is a type of watch or clock movement that keeps time with an electronic oscillator whose rate is controlled by a quartz crystal. The first quartz wristwatch sold commercially, Seiko’s Quartz-Astron of 1969, gained or lost no more than about five seconds a month.
How does a quartz movement work?
In a quartz movement, an electronic oscillator keeps time. A quartz crystal controls how fast that oscillator runs. The crystal vibrates at a very high frequency, too high to run a motor directly. So the movement divides that frequency down electronically. In 1927 Warren A. Marrison divided it until it was slow enough to run a synchronous motor. In Seiko’s Quartz-Astron, an integrated circuit did the dividing. Its crystal vibrated 8,192 times per second. Over a year, the watch’s error came to around a minute at most.
Where it comes from
Joseph W. Horton and Warren A. Marrison described and built the first quartz clock at Bell Telephone Laboratories in October 1927. It was the first clock to take its time signal from a quartz-crystal oscillator. Its crystal vibrated 50,000 times per second. The wristwatch came much later. Seiko released the Quartz-Astron 35SQ in December 1969, the first quartz wristwatch sold commercially. The first Swiss quartz watch, the Beta 21 from Ebauches SA, was shown at the Basel Fair in 1970. Watches from Omega, Tissot and Longines use quartz movements.
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