World's Most Accurate Wristwatch Hits Kickstarter

A company that has produced an atomic wristwatch accurate to one second in a thousand years has turned to crowdfunding site Kickstarter to help bring the technology to market.

Created by entrepreneur and clocksmith John Patterson and his Bathys Hawaii watch company, the Cesium 133 is more accurate by three orders of magnitude than the technologies currently used in wristwatches

Each second is measured in accordance with the International System of Units by it dividing precisely into 9,192,631,770 vibrations of the cesium 133 atom.

Patterson is now hoping to raise $42,000 (£25,100) in funding through Kickstarter in order to further the development of what he hails as a "breakthrough in timekeeping".

"It's the world's most accurate wristwatch," Patterson said. "The chip inside of it has all the workings of a real atomic clock and it all just runs on rechargeable batteries."

Less than two days after the campaign launched over half of the target amount has already been pledged.

Timekeeping of the future

While the "revolutionary" chip-scale atomic clock (CSAC) is still a relatively large piece of technology for a wristwatch, Patterson believes that as the technology develops, the size will decrease.

"People have made fun of its size, but it's a prototype," he said. "If you think about what cell phones were when they first came out, they were huge.

"We are anticipating that the chips will get smaller and certainly compared to (the prototype) our next production piece will be considerably slimmer."

Only between six and 10 of the Cesium 133 atomic watches will be created in the first production run, each costing $6,000.

"What you're going to see is this technology becoming common place, maybe ten years from now, but there is only one first one and the Cesium 133 is it."