Quartz : you must have heard or seen it in your wrist watches!

Before quartz came in to the market. most successful clocks were the pendulum clocks or spring watches or Mechanical clocks/watch. you can still see these watches in some historical places, Museums and a collector who collects clocks or watches. Although this watches was the most accurate and popular during that time, It has some problems such as, you have to keep winding the watches/clocks. If you forget to wind them, they stop and you have no idea what time it is at that moment, you have to know the time first and then you need to wind the clock and then clock will come back to action which is tiresome for most of us! There are two more difficulty with them. gravity varies at sea level and at the top of the mountain which also affect the accuracy of time. as pendulum is made of metal the length of the pendulum also changes according to temperature, it gets elongated in summer and shrinks in winter which again reduces the accuracy. In order to overcome this problem quartz watches came in and became a superstar in clocks and wrist watches.

first of all why does it was named Quartz? as you can see in the image, at bottom of the dial of a Rolex watch. That Quartz means the watch mechanism have Quartz stone in it to achieve the rotational movement of the hour, minute and second hands. which is explained below.

The Quartz crystal

The Quartz is the name of crystal which has a property of creating Mechanical sound waves, in simple forms it vibrates in specific frequency when electric supply is being given and vice versa. (When we squeezes the Quartz gem it generates small amount of electricity. This phenomenon is called piezoelectric effect.

Working Diagram of Quartz gem

Inside a quartz clock or watch, the battery sends electricity to the quartz crystal through an electronic circuit. The quartz crystal oscillates (vibrates back and forth) at a precise frequency: exactly 32768 times each second. The circuit counts the number of vibrations and uses them to generate regular electric pulses, one per second. These pulses can either power an LCD display (showing the time numerically) or they can drive a small electric motor (a tiny stepping motor, in fact), turning gear wheels that spin the clock's second, minute, and hour hands.

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