Rock Clock.

• Autores: Mark Fischetti
• Localización: Scientific American, ISSN 0036-8733, Vol. 290, Nº. 3, 2004, págs. 98-99
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • This article discusses quartz watches. Batteries provide the power to turn the hands or fire the liquid-crystal display, but quartz oscillators-essentially, vibrating tuning forks--provide the chronometers' steady beat. Today Swatch and several Japanese firms supply most of the world's tuning fork oscillators, says Anton Bally, Swatch Group manufacturing president. They are mass-produced from artificial quartz using a photolithographic process devised by East German defector Juergen Staudte in 1968 at North American Aviation, now Rockwell. In that gear, Timex employed no software engineers, says vice president Lou M. Galie, but today programmers make up more than half the engineering staff. Quartz, Quartz Everywhere: Tiny quartz tuning forks provide precise reference frequencies for millions of computer chips, cellular phones, radio transmitters, satellite transceivers and music synthesizers.