Quartz Clock

A quartz clock or quartz watch is a timepiece that keeps time using an electronic oscillator regulated by the precise mechanical vibrations of a quartz crystal, making it at least an order of magnitude more accurate than a mechanical clock. Digital logic counts the cycles of the crystal's signal and converts them into a numerical display of hours, minutes, and seconds. The first quartz clock was described and built by Joseph W. Horton and Warren A. Marrison at Bell Telephone Laboratories in October 1927, using a quartz crystal driven electrically to vibrate at fifty thousand cycles per second. Quartz timekeeping became the world's most widely used method once solid-state digital electronics of the 1980s allowed it to be made compact and inexpensive, and it is now standard in most clocks, watches, and computers.