History:

The cuckoo clock has an impressive parent in the Black Forest clock. The provinces of Baden and Wuirttemburg (now the province of Baden-Wiirttemburg) lie deep in the Black Forest region of Germany. Winters there are long, dark, cold, and characterized by deep snowfalls. With forestry and agriculture limited during this season, a cottage industry in the production of clocks grew in the Black Forest. Glass-making was a traditional craft, and clock-making sprang indirectly from this when, in about 1640, a traveler introduced a simple Bohemian clock operated by three wheels on a train (continuous drive), a verge escapement (the device that allows the train to advance a controlled amount by restraining it with weights), and a foliot (a balance bar). The clock was not ornamented.

The local citizens learned how to copy the clock and make the tools to craft it. They also worked together as a group with specialists in frame-making, manufacturing the clockworks, making and painting dials, brass founding, making chains and gongs, finishing metal parts, and performing many supporting tasks. The clockmaker made his own patterns and styles; parts for his clocks were unique and not interchangeable with other makers. By the late 1700s, the clocks were a profitable export for the region and were sold as far away as Russia.

The cuckoo clock may have been invented in about 1730 by Franz Anton Ketterer, a well-known Black Forest clockmaker from Schonwald. The cuckoo's sound was simply incorporated in the contemporary clocks of the day. They had face shields—full front plates that were enameled with the face near the center—rather than the wood frame developed later. Ketterer's clocks were driven by suspended weights shaped like pine cones, and these were adapted to the wood-frame style later. Ketterer used the church organ pipe as the basis for the production of the cuckoo's sound, and his clock-making abilities were so skilled that the cuckoo clock became known for its reliability as a timepiece.

The variety of cuckoo clocks reflects clock-making styles of the time. A clock dating from 1770 may have a painted face shield with roses and castles. This was the English style of the day, but was popularized throughout southern Germany and Central Europe; the same design appears on the sides of painted barges. Soon, the decoration was modified to suit the targeted market. For instance, the French liked large bouquets of bright flowers and called the cuckoo clocks "Swiss clocks" even though most were made in Germany. Scandinavians preferred hexagonal or octagonal faces, while the Dutch and Belgians liked tin or porcelain dials. In England, the clocks were called "Dutch" clocks (possibly from "Deutsche," meaning German), and they were simple mahogany rims with glasses held in place with brass bezels.

By the mid-eighteenth century, cuckoo clocks moved from the peasant or cottage industry to factories. By 1850, a style called the "hunting lodge" or "chalet" style dominated; the frame shows a lodge at the base of the clock, the clock dial over the roof, and carved trees and animals rising above the dial to the top of the frame. In "The Cricket on the Hearth," author Charles Dickens describes a clock with the figure of a haymaker with a scythe who moves with the pendulum. One particular style called the "Surrerwerk" or whizzing work strikes with the sound of twelve blows like the sound of small hammers. Usually, the cuckoo clock had two drive trains, one for the clock movement and the other for the socalled striking train, or the sounds and actions produced with the striking of the hour.

The movements became standardized in style, size, and materials. European movements are of brass and steel, and American movements are brass. The numerals on the dial are painted in German gothic style. Modern cuckoo clocks have retained the suspended pine-cone weights. Some large cuckoo clocks made at the end of the nineteenth century also housed barometers. Later clocks from about 1900 have wood frames, brass wheel works, and a wooden carved cuckoo on a sweeping stand that shifted forward to chime the hour. Inlaid wood has also been used to make cuckoo clocks, notably those from Northern Italy in the Ampezzo region. Late in the twentieth century, the cuckoo clock entered the digital age when manufacturers began equipping some models with quartz clocks that play twelve different tunes, one for each hour, and an automatic shutoff to silence the bird for a programmable number of hours during the night.