Sudden thought: I basically never think about clocks and watches “running slow” these days, but as late as the late 80s that was still a thing. You’d call a special number on the phone to reset the home clock. My first watch was a hand-me-down windup wristwatch from my dad. Quartz watches only became cheap and popular in the 70s and 80s, and “quartz” was rare enough you’d explicitly use the adjective. The default watch was the non-quartz windup mechanical watch.

Quartz watches too can drift. Cheap non-quartz bedside electric clocks still use the grid frequency assumed to be 60hz or 50hz as a timekeeping hack and drift worse.

But “my clock/watch is slow” is an excuse you basically never hear anymore because phones are hooked up to gps atomic time (rubidium, only slightly less accurate than the cesium standard) via the cell network. Computers and wifi similarly hook into atomic time via NTP.

Really hard problem that drove European science and technology for ~1000 years and then… just went away. Solved and forgotten problem.