During the early years, wind up watches are make up of various components including a spring to give the power, gears connecting to hands on dial and coordinating the movement of the speed, oscillating weight. It is important to note that once the mainspring is fully wound, any more actions to wind up the spring will cause damage to the wheels. Then the Bulova company used a transistor oscillator in replaced of the balance wheel. The watch will hummed instead of the old ticking sound. A battery is used in place of the wind up main spring. Soon, quartz crystal make up of silicon dioxide are used in place of the tuning fork. Quartz crystals have been used for many years in radio transmitters, computers because of their accuracy. The only problem is the correct selection of a suitable type of crystal. Both the type and frequency of the crystal must be carefully selected. Quartz is so named because it came from the German Quarz. It is an amazing type of piezoelectric crystal that will create electricity through a process called piezoelectricity. It will generate electricity when mechanical stress is put upon it. The latest quartz crystals are designed into an electronic circuit called crystal oscillator. It creates the electrical signal with a very precise frequency by the use of mechanical resonance of a vibrating crystal of piezoelectric material. This frequency is used to keep track of the time. That is why quartz watches are more accurate than wind up watches and they have fewer working parts than the wind up watches. Fewer working parts will usually reduce the breakdown. And how do you differentiate quartz watches from wind up watches? It is easy, a quartz watch second hand will jump one second at a time whereas wind up watch will sweep around the dial. The wind up watch usually produce ticking sounds while quartz watch is usually very quiet but some quartz watch can produce ticking sounds depending on the structure of the watch itself.
Brian Po Kenny is a webmaster of www.clockwatchassembly.com and his hobby includes collecting antique watches and clocks. For more informations and his huge gallery of watches and clocks, visit his website at http://clockwatchassembly.com .
