How Quartz Watch Work

History of Quartz Watches

Quartz watch technology has revolutionized timekeeping over the last century. In the 1920s, quartz clocks were developed that used the vibrations of quartz crystals to keep time with a previously unachievable precision.

By the 1960s, this technology was miniaturized for wristwatches, enabling accuracy to within seconds per month.

The advent of quartz watches represented a massive leap over traditional mechanical watches. Mechanical watches relied on a complex system of gears and springs that were subject to inaccuracies of minutes to hours per week.

Quartz watches with digital displays provided an exactitude never before possible for most people. Their lower cost also eventually made accurate timekeeping broadly accessible.

By the 1980s, quartz watches saturated the market due to major price drops. High volume production of quartz technology components and widespread competition drove costs down.

Digital quartz sports watches became hugely popular, while analog quartz dress watches provided an affordable and precise alternative to mechanical models.

Today, quartz watches remain ubiquitous due to their affordability, accuracy, and minimal need for servicing. They have become more advanced, with some using radio signals to automatically calibrate to atomic clocks.

Yet the basic quartz movement inside has remained largely unchanged since its origins – a testament to its elegant and efficient design for keeping time.

Leedon launched our new quartz watch collections in 2023, becoming pioneers in making this groundbreaking timekeeping technology available to the widest range of customers possible.

We continue improving and expanding our quartz watch offerings to enable more people to experience the joys of precision, quality and style once available only to a few.

What Are Quartz Crystals?

Quartz crystals exhibit a property known as piezoelectricity. When pressure or heat is applied to certain materials like quartz crystals, they generate an electric charge. The orderly arrangement of molecules in quartz crystals gives them a uniform structure that vibrates in a precise manner.

They oscillate at a stable frequency when an electric current is applied, which forms the basis for their use in timekeeping instruments.

The molecular structure of quartz crystals features a repetitive three-dimensional pattern. Their molecules are tightly packed in an orderly lattice formation.

When quartz crystals are stimulated by an electric charge, their molecules vibrate and resonate at a consistent frequency. For quartz, this frequency is 32,768 vibrations per second.

This consistent and stable vibration frequency enables quartz crystals to keep nearly perfect time. Their uniform molecular structure causes the same number of vibrations each second, only deviating by a second over thousands of years.

By counting the number of vibrations, quartz crystals can accurately keep time and are used in clocks, watches, and other electronics.

When used in timekeeping devices, a quartz crystal is placed in an oscillator circuit that causes it to vibrate at its resonant frequency. The vibrations are counted electronically and translated into regular time increments to keep time and display the accurate counting of seconds.

Quartz crystals revolutionized timekeeping accuracy with their stable frequency and consistent vibration that could be harnessed with simple and affordable electronic components.

How Quartz Watches Keep Time

Quartz watches keep time by counting the precise vibrations of a quartz crystal. The quartz crystal acts as a microscopic tuning fork, vibrating at a stable frequency of 32,768 times per second.

An electronic oscillator circuit applies electricity to the quartz crystal, causing it to vibrate. The circuit counts each vibration and translates them into regular time increments to power the digital or analog display.

Inside a quartz watch, the quartz crystal is placed in a small metal plate with electrodes attached. When the electric current passes through the crystal via the electrodes, it causes the uniform molecular structure of quartz to vibrate at its natural resonance.

These vibrations generate pulses of electricity that act like a timing reference for the watch.

The pulses from the vibrating quartz crystal are input into a series of dividers and logic gates (integrated circuits) that convert the high-frequency signal into regular electronic timing pulses, one per second.

Additional circuitry is used to derive minutes, hours and calendar information from these timing pulses.

For analog quartz watches, the electronic timing signals are used to physically generate motion. One timing pulse per second mechanically advances the second hand, while one pulse per minute mechanically moves the minute hand. Gears translate the motion of these hands to the hour and calendar displays.

For digital quartz watches, the electronic timing signals directly drive numeric liquid crystal displays to show hours, minutes and seconds. Since the timing is all electronic, more advanced features can be shown like chronographs, alarms, and calendars.

Higher frequency crystals are also used in some watches to provide greater accuracy, up to 1/1000th of a second.

In summary, quartz watches achieve unparalleled accuracy for affordable timekeeping by utilizing the consistent resonance of quartz crystals. Their stable vibration frequency results from the highly uniform molecular structure of quartz.

Simple electronic components translate these vibrations into a precise time reference to power either analog or digital time displays. This fusion of materials and electronics revolutionized watchmaking and made precision broadly accessible.

Leedon watch quartz wathes:

Quartz watch

Success with Leedon Watch

For over 50 years, Leedon Watch has pioneered quartz timekeeping, bringing unrivaled accuracy and style to wristwatches. As one of the first watchmakers to adopt quartz movement technology, we have spent decades perfecting our craft to deliver quartz watches able to meet the highest demands of performance, durability and design.

Leedon now offers our quartz watch manufacturing capabilities to brands seeking to produce collections under their own label. You provide the vision – we apply over half a century of mastery in realizing it.

Focus on your customers and marketing to them. We focus on engineering excellence as a transparent partner invested solely in your success.