It also began using a crystal oscillator for more stable readings and accurate accounts of movement within the air.
One difficulty was that there were no crystal oscillators in those days, so they had to design their own frequency generators.
Nevertheless, Nicholson is still regarded as the inventor of the crystal oscillator.
Almost all digital electronic circuits now rely on this in the form of crystal oscillators.
A major reason for the wide use of crystal oscillators is their high Q factor.
A crystal oscillator, for instance, drifts about 1 to 2 seconds in a month, or 1.4x10 seconds an hour.
In the mid-1980s, Brent came across a product type known as temperature-compensated crystal oscillators.
In most applications, a crystal oscillator is common, but other resonators and frequency sources can be used.
The signal can be generated using a crystal oscillator.
The timer worked, but was not accurate enough to use as a stopwatch due to lack of a crystal oscillator.