Quartz Watch

Many of us have heard about quartz crystals keeping time accurate but I was wondering what exactly do these quartz do to keep the watch to maintain its staggering precision?

LET'S START!
Video;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pM6uD8nePo

Quartz Basic:Quartz is the most common mineral found on Earth. They are transparent or can be known as "crystals" which your mom wears as jewellery since they are nice, attractive and shiny!

Before Quartz
The wind-up watch is an amazing piece of technology itself! It is part of a continuous research-and-development effort that started at the end of the 14th Century. Over the years, different innovations made wind-up watches smaller, thinner, more reliable, more accurate and even self-winding!

The components that you find in today's wind-up watches have been around for centuries:

1)A spring to provide the power
2)Some sort of oscillating mass to provide a timebase
3)Two or more hands
4)An enumerated dial on the face of the watch
5)Gears to slow down from the ticking rate of the oscillating mass and connect the mass and spring to the hands on the dial

Then came the quartz....

There was no problem with the choice of a timing element. The quartz crystal is possibly thousands of times better for timing than the tuning fork, and quartz crystals had been around for many thousands of years. Only the type and the frequency of the crystal needed to be chosen. The difficulty was in the selection of the integrated circuit technology that would function at sufficiently low power.

Quartz crystals have been in regular use for many years to give an accurate frequency for all radio transmitters, radio receivers and computers. Their accuracy comes from an amazing set of coincidences: Quartz -- which is silicon dioxide like most sand -- is unaffected by most solvents and remains crystalline to hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit. The property that makes it an electronic miracle is the fact that, when compressed or bent, it generates a charge or voltage on its surface.(this is why the clock is so accurate!) This is a fairly common phenomenon called the Piezoelectric effect. The electronics of the watch initially amplifies noise at the crystal frequency. This builds or regenerates into oscillation -- it starts the crystal ringing. The output of the watch crystal oscillator is then converted to pulses suitable for the digital circuits, which sends the clock ticking!

In Conclusion:
It works by using the piezoelectric effect: if a small voltage is applied to a specially prepared crystal of quartz it vibrates at a definite and almost constant frequency which can be used to power a tiny motor to turn the hands of the watch.

Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_does_a_quartz_watch_work#ixzz1GODFJHzq