Teddy Baldassarre
What is a Quartz Watch? Everything You Need to Know
The advent of the quartz watch was the most disastrous event ever to befall the traditional luxury watch business, an existential threat that nearly toppled the watch industry as we know it. The invention of the quartz watch was among the most significant advances in the history of timekeeping and brought affordable wristwatches to the masses in a way that had never been seen before. These are the two main schools of thoughts on what the quartz watch has meant to the history of watchmaking, and both are essentially correct. As you contemplate whether to purchase a quartz watch, ponder the main differences between quartz and mechanical movements, and try to wrap your head around the various types of timekeeping technologies, let’s explore how quartz watches originated, how they evolved, and what their place is in today’s ever-changing watch world. [toc-section heading="Quartz Movements Explained"] Unlike a mechanical movement, which stores its energy in a wound mainspring inside a barrel and releases it through a complex series of gears to move the hands, a quartz movement derives its power from a small electrical charge provided by a battery, which then passes through an integrated circuit that applies the charge to a tiny quartz crystal cut into the shape of a tuning fork. Thanks to something known as the reverse-piezoelectric effect, that tiny charge applied to the quartz tuning fork crystal causes it to vibrate at an incredibly high rate that dwarfs the output of ...
