What is a quartz watch & How does a quartz watch work?
Updated
by Vaer Watches
The term quartz refers to a watch with a quartz movement. Here at Vaer, we love quartz watches because they're affordable, accurate, and easy to care for.
Using the term quartz to describe a watch refers specifically to the technology powering the watch's inner timekeeping device. This timekeeping machine, referred to as a watch movement, serves a similar role in a watch as an engine in a car. Like a car engine, it's typically hidden from view and is the core technology powering all mechanical operations.
- Reagan Cook, Vaer Co-Founder
Why is it called a quartz watch?
The movement in a quartz watch relies on an electronic oscillator regulated by a quartz crystal to keep time. Unlike more traditional mechanical watches, a quartz watch's crystal oscillator creates a signal with very precise intervals, leading to far greater accuracy than even the most expensive mechanical watches. Beyond the simple oscillation, the quartz movement is also responsible for a simple computational logic that determines time-based cycles such as seconds, minutes, hours and days. There are a variety of complications based around the core quartz technology (GMTs, chronographs etc.) and there has been a near-endless variety of quartz watch designs since the technology first arrived in the late 1970s, and today quartz watches and clocks are the most widely used timekeeping technology on earth.
