the seller of watch states that the movement is :MECHANICAL:AUTOMATIC.what does he mean.Swiss quartz is written on it.does it use a battery for it to be operated
A watch crystal is the clear stuff you look through to see the time - it may be plastic, glass, lead crystal, or rather rarely, quartz. Quartz is a crystalline form of silicon dioxide which can appear in nature as clear rock crystal including being ground by man into a sphere for use, among others, for seeing the future (they say.) It has the interesting characteristic that if you hit it with an electrical voltage it changes shape and if you squeeze it, it produces a voltage. Thus it can be used to make a spark for lighting a torch or other flame and it can be put in an electrical circuit where the voltage it produces interacts with the pulses of electricity and, depending on exactly how it is ground and shaped, sharply limit the frequency of those pulses. Thus crystals used in radio transmission may have millions of cycles per second or one used in a watch may have thousands which can be divided down.
In electronics we use this to generate a very precise tone or frequency. It is the modern version of the tictac in older clocks. The watch crystal usually refers to the window through which you look at the time Hope this answers your question
Watches normally use a very low frequency quartz crystal that vibrates at 32,768 Hz. A simple 15 stage divider turns this into 1 Hz. These 32Khz (or more precisely, 32.768Khz) crystals have a tuning fork like shape which is why they have much lower resonant frequency than crystals which use the bulk piezelectric effect, which typically many megahertz range for similar sized crystals.
If you are talking about the device used to control an electronic watch's timekeeping, no difference. If you are talking about the glass cover, crystal refers to leaded glass crystal.
all watch crystals are quartz crystals but not all quartz crystals are used in watches. Some are used to tune radio transmitters. Others, to tune circuits in computers.
