You can see these clock peddlers being featured in cuckoo clock designs today.Ĭuckoo birds are a shy family of bird, are more often heard then seen and will often call at night-time. They could carry dials and movements on their backs displaying their range of time pieces. These timepieces were typically sold door to door in the Black Forest by “Uhrentrager” or Clock peddlers which translates to ‘clock carriers’. The Black Forest unarguably created the cuckoo clock industry and continued to develop the movement and clock case designs which have made the cuckoo clock a valued work of art all over the world.Ĭuckoo Clocks were exported to the rest of the world from the mid 1850’s and became an iconic symbol of southern Germany culture and heritage. Clearly though, as it goes for most engineering feats, there is a combination of engineering factors brought together by different innovators.Ī fine example is the Comitti Navigator clock which you can read more about in a special blog post by clicking the button below: We could give credit to Franz Anton Ketterer for being the first to combine all elements to make the iconic cuckoo clock as we know it today. He states that the clock master got the idea of how to make the cuckoo call from the bellows of the church organ. His reports about industry and traffic in the Black Forest states that in 1730 the first Cuckoo Clock was made by Franz Anton Ketterer from Schonwald (“Beautiful forest” – likely referring to the Black Forest). The most well-known and accepted is a story was found in a passage written by a priest Markus Fidelis Jack. It’s hard to know for sure, and there are a different few tales. It is widely accepted and known that in the middle of the 18 th century (1740-1750) cuckoo clocks with wooden gears were being produced in the Black Forest.īut who was the first to put together all the elements the moving cuckoo bird, its call, the coo coo call indicating the time after the clock strikes on the hour, a weight driven movement and gravity-based pendulum? These are the very first written or documented mentioning of the elements that make up the cuckoo clock today. However, this clock movement was not the same mechanism used in cuckoo clocks today. A picture in this book shows many of the elements of a mechanical cuckoo clock we know of today (bird calling on the hour, the sound made by two organ pipes). There is a written description of a cuckoo clock by a Augsburg nobleman Philipp Hainhofter (1578 – 1647) which describes a cuckoo clock belonging to prince Elector August Von Sachsen.Īnother mention is in a handbook on music written by scholar Athanasius Kircher in 1650 describing a mechanical organ with moving figures. The first written descriptions of Cuckoo Clocks have been found in the following texts: Mechanical cuckoo clocks and clock making have been documented in the Black Forest as early as 1650. What is the history of this famous and treasured German icon? The History Of The Black Forest Cuckoo Clock So much memory and history is embedded into each Cuckoo Clock and the home it occupied. It is often a trigger for many fond memories including trips to see Oma and Opa, getting caught as a child pulling on the pine cone weights or hearing the coo coo call during the middle of the night when you couldn’t sleep. Many people will experience a flood of memories after hearing the iconic ‘coo coo’ call. For many, the Cuckoo Clock and its ‘coo coo’ call is a symbol of their ancestry and heritage. The Cukoo Clock is a unique time piece that represents so much more than just German engineering and craftsmanship. The ‘coo coo’ call will induce a feeling of nostalgia for anyone with German heritage and the cuckoo bird that peeps out of small doors on the hour to ‘coo coo’ is still a crowd pleaser to this day. The famous "Coo Coo" call of the German Cuckoo Clock
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