Hi Friends,
While buying watches you may have come across many terms like Quartz, Automatic, Mechanical, Digital, Kinetic Quartz etc. Many of you may be wondering what they actually mean.
Today, I would like to share with you some insights into this. This may help you to take wiser decision while buying watches.
Based on functionality, wrist watches can be broadly categorized into following groups:
A. Mechanical
B. Quartz
Mechanical watches:
Mechanical wrist watches are the oldest form of watches. They have evolved from the same technology used in pendulum clocks.
Any wrist watch to function, needs some kind of energy source. Mechanical watches derive the energy source from a spring (coil). This main spring is wounded by hand using crown attached to the case of the watch. They are also called Hand Wound Watches. When the spring is wounded fully, the energy gets stored and released very slowly to other parts to convert the same into time keeping. I shall explain in detail how it functions in my next post.
When people were tired of winding the watches by hand, self winding watches were invented. These were called Automatic watches. They used your hand movement as the main source of energy. A rotor is used to convert the energy generated by hand movement to wind the coil or the main spring.
For centuries, mechanical watches dominated the industry. Swiss watch manufactures mastered the art of producing some of the finest Mechanical and automatic watches which are in vogue even today.
Quartz watches :
Generally, Mechanical watches were bulky as they used as many as over 250 parts to make the watch function. Also, due to winding energy, the time keeping was less accurate as the time lapsed. This paved the way to the birth of Quartz watches.
Quartz Crystals which are natural elements available in nature with some unique qualities. When you apply electrical energy to Quartz Crystal, it oscillates with high frequency.
In Quartz watches Quartz Crystal Resonator is used in the form of a small tuning fork. When electrical energy is applied through a small button type battery, it oscillates with very high and accurate frequency. 32,768 oscillations per second to be exact. These oscillations are then converted to a pulse through other parts like step motors & semi conductors to use these pulses in accurate time keeping. Quartz watches comes with high accuracy as +/- 15 seconds per month compared to 8 to 10 minutes of Mechanical watches.
In my next posts, I shall endeavor to explain you how these two technologies work. Keep a tab on this blog to learn more about wrist watches.
Cheers,
M G Kamath
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