Cuckoo Clocks make wonderful timepieces and gifts. Their creative unique designs, various shapes, styles, and Historical German tradition sets them apart. These handcrafted wooden creations touch the hearts of their owners in special ways. Their history, quality, detail, and superior craftsmanship is unmatched. These treasured collectible clocks are handed down from generation to generation.

Cuckoo clocks are magical works of art with mid-18th century tradition.

Black Forest Cuckoo Clocks from Germany are the world’s finest. These hand-carved masterpieces feature precision mechanical movements, detailed craftsmanship, moving figurines, and music to delight you. Bring the sounds of an Authentic German Cuckoo Clock to your home today!

Introduction

A cuckoo clock is a clock, typically pendulum driven, that strikes the hours using small bellows and whistles that imitate the call of the Common Cuckoo in addition to striking a wire gong. The mechanism to produce the cuckoo call was installed in almost every kind of cuckoo clock since the middle of the eighteenth century and has remained almost without variation until the present.

Characteristics

The design of a Black Forest cuckoo clock is now conventional. Most are made in the shape of a rustic birdhouse or chalet to hang on a wall. The wooden case is frequently decorated with carved leaves and animal heads. Most now have an automaton of the bird that appears through a small trap door while the clock is striking.

The bird is often made to move while the clock strikes, typically by means of an arm that lifts the back of the carving. There are two kind of movement: a one-day movement and an eight-day movement. Some have musical movements, and play a tune on a swiss music box after striking the hours and/or half-hours. Musical German Cuckoo Clocks frequently have other automata which move when the music box plays. Cuckoo clocks are almost always mechanical weight driven movement; a very few are spring driven. The weights are made of cast iron in a pine cone shape. 1 Day Clocks need to be wound by pulling up the weights each day. 8 Day Clocks need to be wound by pulling up the weights every 7-8 days

In recent years, quartz battery-powered cuckoo clocks have been available. These do not have genuine cuckoo bellows. The cuckoo bird flaps its wings as it calls to the sound of running water in the background. The call is an actual recording of a cuckoo in the wild. During the cuckoo call the double doors open and the cuckoo emerges only at full hour, and they do not have a gong wire. One thing that is unique about the quartz cuckoos is that it has a light sensor, so when you turn your lights off at night, it automatically turns off the cuckoo call. The weights are conventionally cast in the shape of pine cones made of plastic, as well as the cuckoo bird and hands. The pendulum bob is often another carved leaf. The dial is small, and typically marked with Roman numerals.

History, The first cuckoo clocks

In 1629 an Augsburg nobleman by the name of Philipp Hainhofer (1578-1647) penned the first known description of a cuckoo clock. The clock belonged to Prince Elector August von Sachsen.

In a widely known handbook on music Musurgia Universalis (1650), the scholar Athanasius Kircher describes a mechanical organ with several automated figures, including a mechanical cuckoo. The bird automatically opens its beak and moves both its wings and tail. Simultaneously, we hear the call of the cuckoo, created by two organ pipes, tuned to a minor or major third.

In 1669 Domenico Martinelli, in his Handbook on elementary clocks Horologi Elementari (1669), suggests using the call of the cuckoo to indicate the hours. Starting at that time the mechanism of the cuckoo clock was known. Any mechanic or clockmaker, who could read Latin or Italian, knew after reading the books that it was quite doable to have the cuckoo announce the hours.

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Cuckoo clocks have a long history. They date back all the way to the 17th century and they are complex machineries. What puts them apart form other types of clocks of the way they work: they are pendulum driven clocks that announce the time with the use of a series of small bellows and pipes. These pieces imitate the call of the Common Cuckoo bird. The main conceptual idea behind it has been refined from its discovery (around the year 1630-1650) up until the mid eighteenth century. Since then, the way musical cuckoo clocks have been built has remained the same until today.The first idea about building a clock to use a small came to Philipp Hainhofer, an Augsburg nobleman, in 1629. A bit later, in 1650, Athanasius Kircher, a known scholar at that time, in a handbook on music, depicted the drawings of a mechanical organ with several automated figures, including a mechanical cuckoo. In fact, this book on music is the first written description on the way cuckoo clocks work. The small bird was supposed to open its beak, flap the wings, and tail from hour to hour. In this whole time, the person owning the clock was supposed to hear the call of the cuckoo. The sound was generated by two organ pipes, tuned to a minor or major third. In 1669, Domenico Martinelli suggested that cuckoo clocks could soon become a trend and could replace old clock designs.

Cuckoo clocks originate from Germany; to be more exact, from the Black Forest region. The first one documented was created by Franz Anton Ketterer, but it is the general idea that more than one person created them in the Black Forest region around the year 1730. Soon after the European people were interested in the idea of having one, people from the entire region were creating such time telling devices during the winter years when they could not work the fields.

When they were first created, cuckoo clocks looked somehow different compared to the later models, especially when referring to their visual aspect. The first models had only minor decorations and were painted with water color paints. But time passed and as the number of requests grew, the complexity of engraving grew accordingly. Birds became more detailed and beautifully crafted and with more and more colors and some figurines were even animated. Cuckoo clock makers created more expensive items, decorated with various figurines, representing scenes family scenes, military scenes or hunting motifs. Read more at http://www.noveltycuckooclocks.com

Producers soon began to turn to clock manufacturing as their main source of income and by the end of the 19th century it turned into an real industry. Factories began to appear which produced them on a large scale and what was once a small family business now had become large enterprises. At one point, it is estimated that over 13,000 people were working in the musical cuckoo clock industry in the Triberg region.