MonoMonday: Inventions of the 20th Century

For laurie54's MM challenge today we have to find inventions of the 20th Century.

During that century, mechanical watches began to be replaced by new watches, which replaced the spring as power source with a battery, and swapped the time-keeping balance-wheel with electrical devices.

The first was the tuning fork watch was invented in the 1950s: it relied on a tiny version of the common tuning fork as used by piano tuners, etc, which was kept vibrating by tiny electrical coils wrapped round it. The electronics used the frequency of the fork to measure time accurately. The Bulova Accutron was the first of these to reach the market, invented by a physicist from Basel, Max Hetzel. They were much more accurate than mechanical watches (claimed to be 99.9977% accurate), and indeed a Bulova was used in the Gemini space missions.

I had a tuning fork watch for my 21st birthday in the early 1970s, made by Omega. It gave stalwart service for many years but it eventually stopped working and it was not sensible to try to have it repaired as by this time the technology had been overtaken by quartz watches. I was going to blip my Omega watch but I must have put it away in too safe a place as I couldn't lay my hands on it today! One day I'll find it and blip it.

So here you have a quartz watch. On 25th December 1969 Seiko unveiled the Astron, the world's first quartz watch, which marked the beginning of the quartz revolution. A quartz watch relies on a quartz crystal’s property of oscillating at a precise frequency when a voltage is applied to it: this very stable frequency is used to ensure excellent time keeping.