Whether they are highly accurate atomic clocks or slightly less accurate quartz watches, electric alarm clocks or grandfather clocks with slowly swinging pendulums, all clocks have one thing in common - they consistently count precise units of time. Those units could be anything we want them to be, but for the world to function in harmony, we have a timekeeping standard based upon three units of time - seconds, minutes, and hours. Most clocks and watches today keep time by applying electric energy to a quartz crystal , a system developed in the 1930s. The energy makes the crystal vibrate or oscillate at a constant frequency and produce regular electric pulses that regulate a motor. The motor advances the watch hands or, in a digital watch, the number display, by one-second increments.
Mechanical watches use a coiled mainspring for power.
The mainspring drives gears that cause a hairspring to oscillate, rocking a lever to and fro. The lever drives other gears that move the clock hands. Atomic clocks, the world's most accurate timekeepers, use the natural vibration, or oscillation, of the cesium atom as their resonator. Cesium atoms vibrate exactly 9,192,631,770 times a second, driving a clock that is accurate to within a millionth of a second per year. In ancient times, people used the rising and setting sun to keep track of time.