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.