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 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 cuckoo clocks frequently have other automata which move when the music box plays. Cuckoo clocks are almost always weight driven; a very few are spring driven. The weights are made of cast iron in a pine cone shape.

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

In spite of being a widely known product, the origin of the cuckoo clock has never been conclusively established. The first Black Forest cuckoo clocks were made between 1740 and 1750, not in 1730 as is so often cited in horological literature. There are two main fables from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which tell conflicting stories about the origin of the cuckoo clock:

The first is from Father Franz Steyrer, written in 1796. He describes a meeting between two clock traders from Furtwangen (Black Forest) who met a travelling Bohemian trader who sold wooden cuckoo clocks. Both the Furtwangen traders were so excited that they bought one. On bringing it home they copied it and showed their imitation to other Black Forest clock traders. Its popularity grew in the region and more and more clockmakers started producing them. The second story is related by another priest, Markus Fidelis Jäck, in a passage from his report "Darstellungen aus der Industrie und des Verkehrs aus dem Schwarzwald" ("Description of Industry and Commerce of the Black Forest"), 1810: "The cuckoo clock was invented by a clock-master from Schönwald [Black Forest]. 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". As time went on, the second version became the more popular, and is the one generally related today.

R. Dorer pointed out, in 1948, that Franz Anton Ketterer (1734 - 1806) could not have been the inventor of the cuckoo clock in 1730 because he hadn't then been born. Gerd Bender in "Die Uhrenmacher des hohen Schwarzwaldes und ihre Werke" wrote that the cuckoo clock was not native to the Black Forest. Schaaf in "Schwarzwalduhren", provides his own research which leads to the earliest cuckoos being in the "Franken-Niederbayern" (Germany) area, in the direction of Bohemia (Czeck Republic), which he notes, lends credence to the Steyrer version.

Although the idea of placing a cuckoo bird in a clock probably did not originate in the Black Forest, it is necessary to emphasize that the cuckoo clock as we know it today, comes from this region located in southwest Germany whose tradition of clockmaking started in the seventeenth century. The Black Forest people who created the cuckoo clock industry developed it, and still come up with new designs and technical improvements which have made the cuckoo clock a valued work of art all over the world. The cuckoo clock history is linked to the Black Forest.

Evolution of design

The first clocks were made to the now traditional Black Forest clock design, the "Schilduhr" (shield clock), which had a painted flat square wooden face, behind which all the clockwork was attached. On top of the square was usually a semicircle of highly decorated wood which contained the door for the cuckoo. There was no cabinet surrounding the clockwork in this model. This model first came into being around 1780/1790 and was the most prevalent model for the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, two styles of cuckoo clocks were prevalent. The first one was called the "Rahmenuhr" (framed-clock). As the name suggests, this clock consisted of a picture frame, usually with a typical Black Forest scene painted on a wooden background or a lithograph. The cuckoo was usually included in the scene, and would pop out in 3D, as usual, to announce the hour. The second style was called a railway-house ("Bahnhäusle") clock. This was created by Friedrich Eisenlohr (1805–1854), a professor of architecture at Karlsruhe Polytechnic, who designed a case for Black Forest clocks in 1850-51 based on the gatekeeper lodges he had designed and built for the Badenian Rhine Valley Railroad. The basic form of the "Bahnhäusle" is very simple: it consists of an oblong or square with an isosceles triangle on top. This clock was originally decorated simply with carved leaves, painted ivy, and flowers you would find outside a typical railway house in Germany at the time. The face of this model was wooden with white numbers, bone hands, a wooden dial and sometimes fir-cone shaped weights. Other models incorporated a painted metal front and enamel dial. It is from the "Bahnhäusle" that most modern Black Forest cuckoo clocks find their origin. As an example, the "hunter or hunting" style which usually displays a deer head, rifles, and dead quarry such as rabbits, was created in 1861 in Furtwangen (Black Forest). So the Bahnhäusle was the start of the more intricate cuckoo clocks where every part of the clock took on the form of Black Forest scenes.

The chalet style originated at the end of nineteenth century. There are Currently three different basic styles: Black Forest chalet, Swiss chalet (with two types the "Brienz" and the "Emmenthal") and finally the Bavarian chalet.

Today, the carvings and clock cabinets are still made in the traditional way by experienced clock-masters. The basic cuckoo clock of today is the railway-house (Bahnhäusle) form, still with its rich ornamentation, and these are known under the name of "traditional".

The centre of production continues to be the Black Forest region of Germany, in the area of Triberg im Schwarzwald and Neustadt, where there are about a hundred firms making the whole clock or parts of it. The cuckoo clock is often wrongly associated with Switzerland, as in the movie The Third Man. In the USA, this error is probably due to a story by Mark Twain in which the hero depicts the Swiss town of Lucerne as the home of cuckoo clocks.