![]() ![]() As an overall exercise in the pursuit of excellence on every level, both technically and aesthetically, a 9F-equipped Grand Seiko is certainly the strongest and most relevant competition for the Eco-Drive Caliber 0100. However, there is much to be said for, first of all, getting a quartz watch from the company that launched the whole genre in 1969 and you also get the famous Grand Seiko fit and finish. AT cut crystals also have inherently better rate stability across typical environmental temperatures than standard tuning fork cuts. The movement actually samples the ambient temperature once per minute, and adjusts the frequency of the crystal to compensate for any temperature induced changes. The shape of the crystal produces much smaller amplitude vibrations than a standard tuning fork-shaped quartz crystal, for better resistance to rate disruption due to movement and physical impact (Citizen says that frequency drift due to positional changes is basically zero) and each crystal in each Caliber 0100 is also tested for optimum temperature frequency response, to double the precision generally demanded of a conventional quartz crystal. As far as I am aware, this is the highest frequency oscillator that anyone has ever used in a quartz watch, and it's 256 times higher than the frequency of a conventional quartz watch. The Caliber 0100 has a quartz crystal with an AT cut, which is the same cut used for the 1975 Crystron – however, it runs at a much higher frequency, at 8,388,608Hz (about 8.4MHz). But in those six months, you got unprecedented precision – the watch was rated to an accuracy of three seconds per year. Compare that to the ☑5 seconds per month typical of less precise quartz watches, and you start to see why the Mega-Quartz was a very, very big deal indeed. The Mega-Quartz was not entirely a success – keeping the crystal, cut to what's known as an AT shape (a sort of lozenge) vibrating at such a high frequency was a major drain on the battery, which only lasted six months or so. More precisely, the Mega-Quartz oscillated at 4,194,304Hz, which is 1,048,576 times faster than a 4Hz balance in a mechanical watch – you start to see why quartz had an unbeatable advantage. In 1975, it released its Crystron Mega-Quartz watch, which had a frequency of 4.1MHz – that's 4.1 million oscillations per second. Citizen, long before the Caliber 0100, was a major innovator in this respect. One of the major areas of research was, and continues to be, higher-frequency quartz oscillators. ![]() However, the pursuit of accuracy and higher precision was to continue, albeit on a smaller scale. The era of true, ubiquitous, low-cost high precision had finally arrived. The very first watch movment to have a quartz oscillator vibrating at that frequency was the Girard-Perregaux caliber 350, which had an integrated circuit made by Motorola. Virtually all have crystals vibrating at the same frequency: the aforementioned 32,768Hz, or 32.768 kilohertz this is 8,192 times higher than the frequency of the balance in a standard mechanical watch. Today, most quartz watches are much more alike than different, at least from a basic tech perspective. Unlike mechanical watches, however, a low price was with quartz watches, no longer synonymous with lesser performance. That watch cost about as much as a then-new Toyota Corrolla, and had a gold case, but as with mechanical watches, economies of scale as well as wholesale adoption of the technology across the entire industry, conspired to drive prices dramatically downward. The first quartz wristwatch was the Seiko Astron, which was released on Christmas Day, in 1969. This resulted a significant improvement in accuracy over virtually all mechanical watches of the time, and the Accutron would go unchallenged for nearly another decade – until quartz oscillators arrived on the scene. The standard for modern mechanical watches is 28,800 vibrations per hour, which can also be expressed in the total number of complete oscillations per second, or Hertz – 28,800 vph is 4Hz. The first really major advance in oscillator technology for watches, and the first decisive step away from the balance and spring, was the Bulova Accutron, which debuted in 1960, and used an electronically driven tuning fork, oscillating at 360Hz. If you go to the British Museum, you can see one, by Tompion, with a 13 foot pendulum and a period of 0.25Hz). A balance can be made to vibrate fairly quickly – much more rapidly than a pendulum (pendulum clocks often oscillate once every second or two although other periods are possible. As a general rule, and all other things being equal, an oscillator vibrating at a higher frequency will have greater precision than one vibrating at a slower frequency. ![]()
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