Building an industry from scratch: the quartz oscillator industry of World War II

Prior to World War II, the use of quartz crystal oscillators for frequency control took place primarily within the domains of the amateur (or ham) and the commercial radio broadcasters. The oscillator manufacturing industry, such as it was, was able to accommodate this small market through an artisan (i.e., making oscillators one at a time by hand) rather than a mass production approach. With the U.S. military's switch to crystal control just prior to the war, the reality of crystal oscillator production changed dramatically. With the coming of war, the military suddenly needed millions of oscillators, a task far beyond the current industry which had never produced more than 100,000 units in a single year. Within a year, a truly mass-production industry was up and running, producing almost 6 million units in 1942 alone (and over two million units per month by the end of the war). This paper gives an overview of the war-time development of this most important industry.