Two benches, one story: the little machine that nearly ended Swiss watchmaking — and the beautiful machinery it nearly ended. Everything you do here is saved in your browser. Come back tomorrow: the benches reset with a fresh challenge.
Inside every quartz watch is a sliver of crystal cut like a tiny tuning fork, humming at exactly 32,768 beats per second — 215, so a chain of fifteen ÷2 chips can halve it down to one tick per second. Its pitch depends on a few things a watchmaker can touch. You get one movement per day, with a hidden defect. Tune it, then certify it.
1983: Swatch movements were sealed in plastic and never meant to be opened — no trimmer for you. This is the watch that saved Switzerland’s industry by refusing to play its game. (swissinfo)
Left: less capacitance → the crystal runs fast. Right: a tuning-fork crystal’s parabolic curve — perfect only at 25 °C.
32,768 ÷ 2, fifteen times over, = one tick per second (shown thousands of times slower).
The stepper motor flips 180° once a second — that’s the tick you can feel on your wrist.
The crystal itself. 32,768 Hz — shown about 16,000× slower. Actual frequency right now: 32,768.0000 Hz
Frequency vs. load: f = fs·(1 + C1/2(C0+CL)) — the watchmaker’s trimmer is just a tiny variable capacitor “pulling” the crystal. Temperature: Δf/f = −0.034 ppm × (T−25 °C)², the tuning-fork parabola. The rate is almost independent of battery voltage — until the stepper can no longer turn, and the watch simply stops. That’s why a quartz watch never “runs slow” at the end of its battery: it dies. When it does, the horloger really is only there to change a battery. The first one to market was Seiko’s Quartz Astron 35 SQ, Christmas 1969. The fallout is charted here.
An El Primero–style automatic chronograph, schematically drawn and actually running: the balance beats, the escape wheel ticks, the rotor swings. Click any part to lift it out onto the tray and read its story. Prefer structure? Switch on Guided order and strip it the way a watchmaker would — back off, rotor out, bridges up, wheels out, down to the mainplate… and finally meet the dial. (the real thing · certified examples)
| Quartz (your bench) | Mechanical (El Primero–style) | |
|---|---|---|
| Rate | not yet certified | −4/+6 s/day allowed by COSC · 36,000 vph |
| Heart | 32,768 Hz crystal | balance wheel at 5 Hz |
| Power | coin cell ≈ 2–3 years | mainspring ≈ 50 hours |
| Complexity | a dozen key components | 200–300 components |
Sign your certificate and challenge your friends:
↩ A fresh hidden crystal defect and a new Part of the Day appear every midnight. Your record lives in this browser — come back tomorrow to defend it.