Quartz clock
Reloj de cuarzo
- Date
- 1927 · confidence high
- Place
- New York, United States
- Credited to
- Warren Marrison and J. W. Horton (Bell Telephone Laboratories)
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
A clock that counts the electrical oscillations of a quartz crystal (50 kHz) and divides them down to seconds, with an error of thousandths of a second per day. It outperformed the best pendulum clocks and was the time standard until atomic clocks.
Walter Cady had built a quartz oscillator in 1921; Marrison and Horton made the complete clock with frequency dividers at the Bell laboratories in Manhattan. The first ones were room-sized.
What it led to
- laboratory and observatory time standards in the 1930s-1950s
- consumer and wristwatch quartz clocks
- quartz oscillators in computers and radios