Jacques and Pierre Curie are credited with the discovery of the piezoelectric effect in 1880. The first practical application did not occur until World War I when another French man, Langevin, used piezoelectrically excited quartz plates to generate sound waves in water for use in submarine detection. Two American pioneers in the area of piezoelectricity were Cady at Wesleyan University and Nicholson of Bell Laboratories. Both were interested in crystal but there is some doubt whether the crystal actually controlled the oscillator frequency. The oscillator patented two years later by Cady was definitely crystal-controlled. It was a complicated affair consisting of a three tube amplifier with a quartz crystal in the feedback path. Vacuum tubes were very expensive in 1920. Often entire radio receivers or transmitters contained only one or two tubes. This may have inspired Pierce to invent a crystal-controlled oscillator using only one tube. The Pierce oscillator is still in wide use with the vacuum tube replaced with a transistor. The first crystal-controlled broadcast station, WEAF New York City, went on the air in 1926, and soon after, most broadcast stations followed its lead, but outside the broadcasting industry there was no great movement to crystal-control. For many years, only broadcast, amateur, and some specialized two-way radio communications equipment used crystals. With only limited applications, crystals were a custom product, handmade by a small number of skilled craftsman. Volume industrial production had not yet arrived. A radio engineering text of that period presented only a brief treatment of quartz frequency control in a section titled "Miscellaneous Applications". Back then, the radio spectrum was uncrowded and the need for precise frequency control had not yet developed.

At the onset of World War II, the United States military was in the process of converting its communications equipment to crystal control. In 1940, it was estimated the war effort would require as many as 100,000 quartz crystals. To meet this requirement, a one billion dollar crash program was initiated involving over 125 factories at its peak. Total war production exceeded thirty million units. Prior to World War II, crystals were made from natural quartz and operated in or a little above the broadcast band (0.5 to 1.5 MHz). A few units operating as high as 4 MHz were made for short wave enthusiasts. The war effort pushed the practical limit to approximately 10 MHz but not without problems, especially "aging". Today it is possible to routinely purchase crystals operating at frequencies as high as 150 MHz, and the upper limit is significantly higher. With special processing, fundamental crystal resonators exceeding 300 MHz and 3rd overtone units exceeding one GHz are possible.