How does a Quartz Watch originate from?

No one person invented the quartz watch

A number of unrelated inventions proceeded the quartz watch. Not until the 1960s did anyone try to bring these inventions together into a single timepiece. American, Swiss and Japanese watch manufacturers made important contributions. Independent researchers, university and industrial scientists, and consumers helped make the quartz watch what it is today.

Quartz clocks existed well before the 1960s. Inventing a quartz wristwatch was a task of miniaturization, requiring low-power, low voltage integrated circuits, miniature quartz crystal oscillators, small batteries, micro motors, and electronic displays. All of these components had to be specifically developed, requiring contributions from several diverse disciplines.

Time Displays

The first quartz wristwatch prototypes, developed in Swiss and Japanese laboratories in the 1960s, had an analog display with rotating hands. Despite their similarity to mechanical watches, it was necessary to develop a new technology to transform the timed intervals provided by the quartz crystal into mechanical energy to rotate the hands. A small stepping motor was created to drive the hands using very low power, guaranteeing a battery life of at least one year.

Electronic displays with time displayed in digits, rather than with hands and dial, caused a sensation when first introduced. The first electronic display, introduced in 1970 on the Hamilton Pulsar, used light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to indicate the time of day in flashing red digits at the push of a button.

At the same time, other researchers were working on the development of liquid crystals for use in digital watch displays. Early liquid crystal displays suffered from high power consumption and poor readability. Improvements in LCD technology eliminated these problems and by the late 1970s LCD watches had become more popular than LEDs.

Digital displays allow the representation of much more than just the current time. Multifunctional watches may also indicate pulse rate, temperature, numerical data, and even short messages.

By 1986, consumer interest shifted away from watches with digital displays back to the more traditional analog dial.

The Battery

A watch battery consists of a single cell. It contains electrodes and an electrolyte that together convert chemical energy into electrical energy. Because different watches have different requirements with respect to voltage, energy and size, batteries vary considerably. The most popular are silver oxide (1.5v) and lithium (3v) cells.

The microelectronics industry gave impulse to the development of small batteries. Miniature batteries were developed during World War II by Samuel Ruben and manufactured by P.R. Mallory (this pair later formed the Mallory Battery Company). But they were neither leak-proof nor long-lasting enough for use in watches.

Early efforts to develop a watch battery were conducted by a team of researchers at Hamilton Watch Company (led by chief chemist Phil Lichty, and including Harold Morgan, Wilmer Gingrich and Edgar Long). When these efforts failed, Hamilton joined forces with National Carbon Company (later Union Carbide) in 1954 to develop a battery for Hamilton's first electric watch, the Ventura.
 

Integrated Circuit

An integrated circuit is an assembly of interconnected components on a small semiconductor chip, usually made of silicon. One chip can contain millions of microscopic components and perform many functions. These components are fabricated together on a slice of silicon crystal (known as a wafer) that contains many ICs arranged in rows. Manufacture of ICs involves a succession of processes, including photolithography, high-temperature diffusion, oxidation, and metallization. The wafer is then separated into chips, which are individually packaged.

The integrated circuit was invented in the United States in different forms by Jack Kirby of Texas Instruments and Robert Nonce at Fairchild Semiconductor. With this new semiconductor technology, computers, communications devices, and all sorts of consumer electronics became possible.

In all quartz watches, the IC makes the quartz crystal oscillate, divides the quartz frequency down to one pulse per second, and drives the display. Many more functions can be added using a microprocessor, making today's quartz watches more like dedicated microcomputers.

The first IC used in a watch was developed in the 1960s in a Swiss laboratory, CEH. The chip's power consumption had to be drastically reduced in order to allow battery life of at least one year. In the first quartz watch, the Beta 21, a single IC containing about 110 components managed all electronic functions of the watch, including quartz crystal excitation, frequency division, and motor drive.

In 1970 the Seiko 36SQC was introduced and was the first quartz watch to use a CMOS chip (a low energy integrated circuit invented at Fairchild in 1963). Today's quartz watches all use CMOS technology, with chips containing 100,000 components and more. They combine microprocessor, memory and analog functions, and act like dedicated microcomputers.

Quartz Crystal

Quartz is a piezoelectric material, meaning that it generates an electrical charge when mechanical pressure is applied. These crystals also vibrate when a voltage from an outside source, such as a battery, is applied. Piezoelectricity was discovered by Pierre Curie and his brother Jacques in 1880. In the early 1920s W.G. Cady recognized that, due to their elastic qualities, mechanical strength and durability, quartz crystals could be used to fabricate very stable resonators. Cady also concluded that the crystal could be cut in specific ways that would create resonators of almost any frequency that were practically independent of temperature variations. Quartz crystals were first used as a time standard by Warren Marrison, who invented the first quartz clock in 1927. Juergen Staudte invented a method for mass-producing quartz crystals for watches in the early 1970s.

The quartz crystals inside watches today come in various shapes and frequencies. The most common crystals are miniature encapsulated tuning forks which vibrate 32,768 times per second. Other types of crystals vibrate at more than 50 million times per second.