A cuckoo clock is a type of clock, typically weight driven and pendulum regulated, that strikes the hours with a sound resembling a common cuckoo call and has an automated cuckoo bird that moves with each note. Some move their wings and open and close their beaks while leaning forwards, whereas others have only the bird's body leaning forward. The mechanism to produce the cuckoo call has been in use since the middle of the 18th century and has remained almost without variation.
It is unknown who invented the cuckoo clock and where the first one was made. It is thought that much of its development and evolution was made in the Black Forest area in southwestern Germany (in the modern state of Baden-Württemberg), the region where the cuckoo clock was popularized and from where it was exported to the rest of the world, becoming world-famous from the mid-1850s on. Today, the cuckoo clock is one of the favourite souvenirs of travellers in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and eastern France. It has become a cultural icon of Germany.
Characteristics
The design of a cuckoo clock is now conventional. Many are made in the "traditional style", which are made to hang on a wall. The classical or traditional type includes two subgroups; the carved ones, whose wooden cases are decorated with leaves, animals, etc., and a second one with cases in the shape of a chalet. They have an automaton of a bird that appears through a small trap door when the clock strikes. The cuckoo bird is activated by the clock movement as the clock strikes by means of an arm that is triggered on the hour and half hour.Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine:
There are two kinds of movements: one-day (30-hour) and eight-day clockworks. Some have musical devices, and play a tune on a Swiss music box after striking the hours and half-hours. Usually the melody sounds only at full hours in eight-day clocks and both at full and half hours in the one-day timepieces. Musical cuckoo clocks frequently have other automata which move when the music box plays. Today's cuckoo clocks are almost always weight driven. The weights are made of cast iron usually in a pine cone shape and the "cuckoo" sound is created by two tiny gedackt pipes in the clock, with bellows attached to their tops. The clock's movement activates the bellows to send a puff of air into each pipe alternately when the timekeeper strikes.
Since the 1970s, quartz battery-powered cuckoo clocks have become available. As with their mechanical counterparts, the cuckoo bird emerges from its enclosure and moves up and down, but often on the quartz timepieces it also flaps its wings and open its beak while it sings. Just before the call, and in case it has a door, the single or double door opens and the bird emerges as usual, but only on the full hour, and they do not have a gong wire chime. The movement of the cuckoo in such clocks is regulated by an electromagnet that pulses on and off, attracting a weight, that acts as a fulcrum, connected to the tail of the plastic cuckoo, thus moving the bird up and down in its enclosure.
In quartz cuckoos, different systems have been used to produce the bird's call; the usual bellows, a digital recording of a real cuckoo in the wild (with a corresponding echo accompanied by the sound of a waterfall and other birds in the background) or a recording of the bird's call only. In musical versions, the hourly chime is followed by the replay of one of twelve popular melodies (one for each hour). Some musical quartz clocks in the chalet style also reproduce many of the popular automata found on mechanical musical clocks, such as beer drinkers, wood-choppers, and jumping deer.
Uniquely, quartz cuckoo clocks often include a sensor, so that when the lights are turned off at night they automatically silence the hourly chime. Others are pre-programmed not to strike between a set of pre-determined hours. Whether controlled by a light sensor or pre-programmed, the function is referred to as a "night silence" feature. On quartz wall clocks in the traditional style, the weights are conventionally cast in the shape of pine cones made of plastic rather than iron. The pendulum bob is often another carved leaf. Here, the weights and pendulum are purely ornamental as the clock is driven by battery power.
History First modern cuckoo clocks An Augsburg merchant named Philipp Hainhofer (1578–1647) wrote the first known description of a modern cuckoo clock in 1629, many decades before clockmaking was established in the Black Forest.For the early history of Black Forest clockmaking, see Gerd Bender, "Die Uhrenmacher des hohen Schwarzwaldes und ihre Werke". Vol. 1 (Villingen, 1975): pp. 1–10.Johannes Graf, The Black Forest Cuckoo Clock. A Success Story. NAWCC Bulletin, December 2006: p. 646. He visited the Kunstkammer (Cabinet of curiosities) of Prince Elector August von Sachsen in Dresden. One of the rooms contained a chiming clock with a moving bird, a cuckoo announcing every quarter of an hour which he described as "a beautiful chiming clock, inside a cuckoo, indicating the quarter hours with its beak and call, the hours with its flapping wings and pour sugar from its tail". Hainhofer does not describe what this clock looked like and who built it. This piece is no longer part of the Dresden Green Vault collection, but it appears in a 1619 inventory book as a "Clock with a cuckoo that yells. It stands on a black pedestal made of ebony on the barber's chest".Inventory book of the Dresden Kunstkammer, 1619: "Darzu is ferner aufs neue einkommen [fol. 88 v.] 1 Uhr mit einem Kuckuck, so verüldt und schreiet Steht uf einem schwarz, von eubenenem holtz gemachten postamentlein uf der balbier lade" (Information provided by the Dresden State Art Collections)
The Dresden timepiece should not have been unique, because the mechanical cuckoo was considered part of the known mechanical arts in the 17th century. Athanasius Kircher's handbook on music Musurgia Universalis (1650) describes a mechanical organ with several automated figures, including a mechanical cuckoo. This book contains the first documented description of how a mechanical cuckoo works.Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis sive Ars magna consoni & dissoni, 2 Vol (Rome, 1650), here Vol. 2, p. 343f and Plate XXI. The book's engraving shows all the elements of a mechanical cuckoo. The bird automatically opens its beak and moves both its wings and tail. Simultaneously, the clock imitates the whistle—call of the cuckoo, created by two organ pipes tuned to a minor or major third.
Subsequently, cuckoo clocks appeared in regions that had not been known for their clockmaking. For instance, the Historische Nachrichten (1713), an anonymous publication generally attributed to Court Preacher Bartholomäus Holzfuss, mentions a musical clock in the Oranienburg palace in Berlin. This clock played eight church hymns and had a cuckoo that announced the quarter hours.Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Document No.:"I.HA, Rep. 36, Nr. 3048, fol. 21f": "In another room, where the Dutch porcelain is kept, is a singing clock, which was made by a farmer in Kaschuben, which plays eight hymns; but the quarter hours are called out by a cuckoo". See also Claudia Sommer, Schloss Oranienburg. Ein Inventar aus dem Jahre 1743where there is also a reference to a currently missing inventory of 1709. The inventory of 1702 does not yet list this clock; therefore, it is probable that it reached Oranienburg between 1702 and 1709, Verwaltung der Märkischen Schlösser).
First cuckoo clocks made in the Black Forest
It is not clear who built the first cuckoo clocks in the Black Forest,Also refer to the discussion on the origin of the Black Forest cuckoo clock to: Richard Mühe, Helmut Kahlert and Beatrice Techen, Kuckucksuhren (München, 1988): pp. 7–14. but there is unanimity that the unusual clock with the bird call very quickly conquered the region. By the middle of the 18th century, several small clockmaking shops between Neustadt and Sankt Georgen were making cuckoo clocks out of wood and shields decorated with paper.Miller, Justin, Rare and Unusual Black Forest Clocks, (Schiffer 2012), p. 30. After a journey through south-west Germany in 1762, Count Giuseppe Garampi, Prefect of the Vatican Archives, remarked: "In this region large quantities of wooden movement clocks are made, and even if they were not completely unknown earlier, they have now been perfected, and one has started to equip them with the cuckoo's call."
It is hard to judge how large the proportion of cuckoo clocks was among the total production of early days Black Forest clocks. Based on the proportion of pieces surviving to the present, it must have been a small fraction of the total production.Helmut Kahlert, Die Kuckucksuhren-Saga, Alte Uhren, No. 4 (1983): pp. 347–353; here p. 349. Especially 18th century cuckoo clocks, in which all the parts of the movement, including gears, were made of wood. They are extremely rare, Wilhelm Schneider was only able to list a dozen of pieces with wooden movements in his book Frühe Kuckucksuhren (Early Cuckoo Clocks) (2008). The cuckoo clock remained a niche product until the middle of the 19th century, made by a few specialized workshops.
Regarding its murky origins, there are two main fables from the first two chroniclers of Black Forest horology which tell contradicting stories about it: The first is from Father Franz Steyrer, written in his Geschichte der Schwarzwälder Uhrmacherkunst (History of the Art of Clockmaking in the Black Forest) in 1796. He describes a meeting, happened around 1742, between two clock peddlers (Uhrenträger, literally "clock carriers", who carried the dials and movements on their backs displayed on huge backpacks), Joseph Ganther from Neukirch (Furtwangen) and Joseph Kammerer from Furtwangen, who met a travelling Bohemian merchant who sold wooden cuckoo clocks. When they returned home, they brought with them this novelty, since it had caught their eyes, and show it to Michael Dilger from Neukirch and Matthäus Hummel from Glashütte, who were very pleased with it and began to copy it. Its popularity grew in the region and more and more clockmakers started making them. With regard to this chronicle, the historian Adolf Kistner claimed in his book Die Schwarzwälder Uhr (The Black Forest Clock), published in 1927, that there is not any Bohemian cuckoo clock in existence to verify the thesis that such a clock was used as a sample to copy and produce Black Forest cuckoo clocks. Bohemia had no fundamental clockmaking industry during that period.
The second story is related by another priest, Markus Fidelis Jäck, in a passage extracted from his report Darstellungen aus der Industrie und des Verkehrs aus dem Schwarzwald (Descriptions of the Industry and Transport of the Black Forest), (1810) said as follows: "The cuckoo clock was invented (in the early 1730s) by a clock-master [Franz Anton Ketterer] from Schönwald. This craftsman adorned a clock with a moving bird that announced the hour with the cuckoo-call. The clock-master got the idea of how to make the cuckoo-call from the bellows of a church organ". Unfortunately, neither Steyrer nor Jäck quote any sources for their claims, making them unverifiable.Johannes Graf, The Black Forest Cuckoo Clock. A Success Story. NAWCC Bulletin, December 2006: p. 647.
As time went on, the second version became the more popular, and is the one generally related today, though evidence suggests its inaccuracy.Johannes Graf, The Black Forest Cuckoo Clock: A Success Story. In: NAWCC Bulletin, December 2006: p. 651. This type of clock is much older than clockmaking in the Black Forest. As early as 1650, the mechanical cuckoo was part of the reference book knowledge recorded in handbooks. It took nearly a century for the cuckoo clock to find its way to the Black Forest, where for many decades it remained a tiny niche product.