Tick, Tock ... Quartz Clock

摘要

When it comes to time, we keep it, measure it, and tell it with quartz. Our wristwatches and stopwatches, wall and automobile clocks, computer and mobile phone clocks, and a host of similar devices all keep accurate time thanks to a tiny sliver of quartz that resonates at a precise rate when electrical current is applied. Quartz's remarkable ability to keep time is due to piezoelectricity, a phenomenon discovered in the 1880s by French physicists Pierre and Jacques Curie. After mechanically stressing quartz crystals, the Curies observed that an electrical potential (voltage) developed across certain crystal faces. They named this effect "piezoelectricity" after the Greekpiezein ("to press").