Warren Marrison

Warren Marrison (1896 to 1980) was a telecommunications engineer at Bell Laboratories who built the first quartz crystal clock. As telephone wires carried more messages and radio broadcasting matured, stable electrical frequencies became essential, and Marrison was searching for more reliable frequency standards. After earning a master degree at Harvard in 1921 he joined Western Electric in New York and moved to Bell Labs in 1925, where he built a large and highly accurate clock driven by the regular vibrations of a quartz crystal in an electrical circuit. Because the crystal frequency was too high to count, in 1927 he divided it electronically until it could drive a synchronous motor, and in doing so produced the first quartz crystal clock almost incidentally. Encouraged by the results, he built an improved version the next year as a time and frequency standard.