Warren Marrison developed the first quartz clock in 1927.
Marrison's clock proved to be more accurate than previous time standards.
Born in Inverary, Ontario, Marrison (1896-1980) had earned a
B.S. from Queens University, Kingston, in 1920. He was the school's
first graduate in a new engineering physics program, and he had
interrupted his formal education for two years to work on radio
communications in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I.
After earning a master's degree from Harvard in 1921, he went
to work for Western Electric in New York City and, four years
later, Bell Laboratories, also in New York. He became a U.S. citizen
in 1941. During his career, he earned 65 patents. Electronic watches today use miniature oscillators similar to the large one used in Marrison's clock, based on the regular vibrations of quartz crystals.
For a complete transcript of Marrison's paper on the history of the quartz clock, go to http://bul.eecs.umich.edu/uffc/marrison/Marrison.htm
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In the early 20th century, as telephone wires carried more messages
and radio broadcasting matured, maintaining stable electrical
frequencies and devising means to monitor the frequencies became
critical technical problems. In 1927, Canadian-born Warren Marrison,
a telecommunications engineer, was searching for reliable frequency
standards at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Building on earlier
work in piezoelectricity by 
Marrison and others demonstrated that the quartz oscillator used in this way
was more accurate than the best existing mechanical clocks used in astronomical
observatories as time standards. During the 1940s, time standard laboratories
throughout the world switched from mechanical clocks to quartz. The
fundamental standard of time remained the rotation of the earth relative to the
stars, but quartz clocks confirmed that the earth was an unreliable timekeeper.
