Quartz Clock - History

History

The piezoelectric properties of quartz were discovered by Jacques and Pierre Curie in 1880. The first quartz crystal oscillator was built by Walter G. Cady in 1921. In 1923, D. W. Dye at the National Physical Laboratory in the UK and Warren Marrison at Bell Telephone Laboratories produced sequences of precision time signals with quartz oscillators. In 1927, the first quartz clock was built by Warren Marrison and J.W. Horton at Bell Telephone Laboratories. The next 3 decades saw the development of quartz clocks as precision time standards in laboratory settings; the bulky delicate counting electronics, built with vacuum tubes, limited their use elsewhere. In 1932 a quartz clock was able to measure tiny variations in the rotation rate of the Earth over periods as short as a few weeks. The National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) based the time standard of the US on quartz clocks between the 1930s and the 1960s, then it went to atomic clocks. The wider use of quartz clock technology had to await the development of cheap semiconductor digital logic in the 60s.

The world's first prototype analog quartz wristwatches were revealed in 1967: the Beta 1 revealed by the Centre Electronique Horloger (CEH) in Neuchâtel Switzerland, and the prototype of the Astron revealed by Seiko in Japan. (Seiko had been working on quartz clocks since 1958). In 1969, Seiko produced the world's first commercial quartz wristwatch, the Astron. The inherent accuracy and low cost of production has resulted in the proliferation of quartz clocks and watches since that time. By the 1980s, quartz technology had taken over applications such as kitchen timers, alarm clocks, bank vault time locks, and time fuzes on munitions, from earlier mechanical balance wheel movements, an upheaval known in watchmaking as the quartz crisis.

Quartz timepieces have dominated the wristwatch and clock market since the 1980s, Because of the high Q factor and low temperature coefficient of the quartz crystal they are more accurate than the best mechanical timepieces, and the elimination of all moving parts makes them more rugged and eliminates the need for periodic maintenance.