I’m starting to age I guess in that I’m enjoying more the sounds of my youth like a simple clockwork cuckoo clock. The timeless sound of the cuckoo bring back many memories. When I was a child, both my uncle and grandparents had cookoo clocks. I remember they were dark colored cases with ornate carvings but the bird that came out was brightly colored. I was told these were from the black forest in Germany.
I guess the Germans have a lock on authentic cuckoo clocks as when I got older, I went shopping for one and they were all German made clockworks. The new ones however were just like I remember. Darker carved woods on the outside with ornate carvings.
My parents had both a mantle clock and a wall clock that struck the quarter half and hour times. They were wonderful. Many people have fond memories about growing up. Foods, holidays, smells, and even sounds. I remember how our home was always breathing the sounds of our clocks. Even as an adult, going for visits brought me in many respects back to childhood days when hearing the constant patterned sounds of those time trackers. It was home!
Today, I have a grandfather clock, cuckoo clock, and several other clockwork type clocks all around my home. Yes, they aren’t as “accurate” as quartz timepieces or as fancy as the latest technology has to offer. But there’s something about their even pace, pendulums, weekly winding and yes, the announcement that time is marching on, that is somehow soothing. Almost melodic.
In the night, when every is asleep, I sometimes go down to the living room and just think. The clocks are busy, as always, pacing out time and announcing yet another quarter hour has past. It’s recognition of mortality, that some things don’t last, while others, like the cuckoo clock seem to last lifetimes.
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How Time Was Measured Before the Clock
How many times have you wondered, “What time is it?” and turned to your wrist only to find you forgot to put on your watch. We have become so programmed to know what time it is and schedule our lives around it that it is second nature to bend your arm, turn your wrist and get the answer. It has not always been so easy, or even necessary as you will see by looking back to a time before clocks and watches.
Like Night and Day
The precision with which we measure time today is light years away from how it was done, not so long ago. Time was once measured completely by the universe around us – and still is in a sense when you understand the science and physics behind the measurement of time and what makes a clock work (more on this in part 2). What earlier civilizations knew and relied upon each day was that the sun came up and went down and that block of time became a day. To measure greater expanses, the moon and its reliable cycles were also observed. The moon was used to measure the time period which came to be known as a month – more technically a lunar month of 28 days – or the time it took for the moon to go from new to crescent to full and new again.
Ancient Civilization
Even more than just observing the moon, sun, and planets, there are artifacts that show us that time was measured a bit more precisely. Early calendars and “clocks” were found in what is now Iraq, once the dwelling place of the ancient Sumerians, and consisted of a calendar that was divided into 30 day segments according to the cycle of the moon. It was then divided into 12 sections which corresponded to 2 hours of today’s time. Further, the calendar was sectioned off into 30 more parts equivalent to 4 modern-day minutes.
Stonehenge is located in England and was built more than 4,000 years ago. Not much is completely understood about this mysterious structure, but the way it is positioned has scientists believing that it somehow was used to record seasons and the phenomenon of lunar eclipses and the like.
Sundials
The Sumerian culture passed away without the information about their timekeeping being discovered until more modern times. The next phase of more precise time measurement was used by the Egyptians. They created the Obelisk around 3500 BC which looked like today’s Washington Monument, well-known to visitors of the Nation’s capital. This tall, tapered monument would cast shadows throughout the day, but was primitive still in how closely the time periods could be measured. It mostly reflected a change between morning and afternoon, and how the days would get shorter or longer with the seasons.
The sundial on the other hand was first used about 1500 BC and was a much smaller and more portable timekeeping device. It was divided into 10 equal parts with two additional segments representing twilight and dawn. The sundial itself then emerged from a horizontal plate to a bowl shape with pointer and inscribed lines to mark off the hours. It is believed that by 30 BC there were more than 13 different styles of sundials used in the evolving societies of Asia Minor, Italy, and Greece.
When one thinks about the precision of a finely crafted Swiss timepiece it is hard to imagine a time when time was so ambiguous. Could society function without time measurements to the very minute? Perhaps in another millennium society will wonder how we functioned living in just one time.
This is the first of a series of articles on the evolution of time measuring and how timepieces come to become what they are today.
Tags: ancient sumerians, calendars and clocks, clock, clock sound, clocks and watches, cuckoo clock, cycle of the moon, international clock, pendulum clock, sundial clock, time, travel clock, watch
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The inside mechanics of cuckoo clocks maintain virtually the same design since the day they were first created in the Black Forest of Germany. While the parts are now sometimes made out of metal and plastic instead of the all wood versions that started it all, the weights and counterbalance mechanisms that help them perform accurately and to imitate the sound of the cuckoo bird have not changed much in almost 300 years. A mechanical movement run by weights that hang from the bottom of the clock drives the action of most cuckoo clocks. Most clocks have three weights, while some larger more complex versions require three weights hanging from the front of the cabinet. They are commonly in the shape of pinecones and must be pulled periodically, depending on the model. Spring-driven cuckoo clocks never really caught on and subsequently are quite rare.
Black Forest cuckoo clocks run on a set of wheels that lock gears and provide the power necessary to swing the pendulum back and forth. Every time the pendulum makes a complete swing back and forth, one tooth of the wheel is released from the escape wheel. Each time a tooth escapes, the time train moves forward, resulting in a very small movement of the minute hand. When you first bring your new cuckoo clock home you will need to test its timing against a battery operated clock of some kind. If you measure the difference in time between your cuckoo clock and “real” time, you can then adjust your cuckoo clock to perform more accurately by adjusting the weights that hang beneath the housing. It’s always an educated guess rather than an exact science, and old fashioned cuckoo clocks are never one hundred percent accurate, but patience and readjustments made every twenty four hours over a few days will get your clock functioning as close to perfection as possible. The standard rule of thumb is to try to get your clock to miss only a few minutes per week and live with it.
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People have already associated
cuckoo clocks with huge shield type designs with wooden carvings and a sweet cuckoo call which repeats itself every half hour or on the stroke of every hour. But in case you notice that your cuckoo call is looking a bit too realistic and you suspect the quality of the cuckoo itself, you may be in for a shock. There is no need for worry yet. Your clock could be a quartz. Quartz cuckoo clocks are also cuckoo clocks but not in the complete sense. One could call it a modern
cuckoo clock.Quartz cuckoo clocks have the exterior of just another normal cuckoo clock but it is what is inside that differs. A quartz cuckoo clock, unlike a normal pendulum driven type, is a battery powered clock, is much more precise than a normal lock and does not need to be rewound again and again for it to keep running. The quartz cuckoo clock may even not be made with wood as the traditional clocks are but plastic or other moulded materials designed to give a wooden finish. Moreover, the cuckoo in itself is not wooden but plastic, coloured with bright colours to add to the aesthetic sense of the customer. But the biggest change of all is that the call of the cuckoo is not produced by bellows blowing air through the ‘gedackt’ pipes but it is rather a recording of the actual cuckoo’s call in the wild.
It does seem that the quartz cuckoo clock just has an umpteen number of negative points and no positives. Well, it is not so. Let me tell you how. A quartz clock is simply not for the connoisseur who cherishes ‘original’ clocks. It is rather for the present day man who wants to attain the luxury of owning a cuckoo clock but cannot or doesn’t want to buy an original piece. This is because of the following reasons. Since the quartz type incorporates a modern and simple clockwork mechanism, it is easy to get it changed or repaired easily. Moreover, the quartz version is much cheaper than the original wooden version. Also the fact that one only needs to change batteries in the quartz clock as compared to winding the original cuckoo clock regularly to keep it running. And the biggest factor of all is that the quartz clock contains a light sensor which automatically stops the cuckoo call when it is night. Read more at http://www.noveltycuckooclocks.com
So if you are one of those sleep deprived, tired of attending to your cuckoo clock type of individuals the safest bet for you is to go and buy a quartz clock from your nearest clock store. Or rather, you could buy it online through a variety of stores ready to cater to individuals like you. To conclude I would call upon a bit of a controversial quote; as Eminem once sang “You might be the next best thing, but not quite me” would be really apt for the quartz cuckoo clock. It is after all a cuckoo clock but it will never be a “real” one in the authentic and traditional sense.
About the Author
Read more about buying a Quartz Cuckoo Clock and traditional Antique Cuckoo Clocks at => http://www.noveltycuckooclocks.com
Tags: clockwork mechanism, cuckoo clock, cuckoo clocks, modern cuckoo clocks, modern quartz cuckoo clocks, quartz clock, quartz clocks, quartz cuckoo clock, quartz cuckoo clock pendulum, quartz cuckoo clocks, traditional quartz cuckoo clocks
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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.
About the Author
Find out more about all types of cuckoo clocks including Antique Cuckoo Clocks and german cuckoo clocks at Musical Cuckoo Clock
Tags: antique cuckoo clocks, cuckoo clock, german cuckoo clocks, musical cuckoo clocks
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