Cuckoo clock
Two little bellows, two wooden pipes and a carved bird: how the Black Forest's most famous clock works, where it came from, and the giant ones you can visit.
What a cuckoo clock is
A cuckoo clock is a wall clock that announces the hour with a two-note call and a little bird that pops out of a door above the dial. Most are hung on a wall because they run on weights that hang on chains below the case, and the weights need room to fall.
The best-known kind is the carved Black Forest clock from southwest Germany, shaped like a house or a hunting lodge and decorated with leaves, birds and deer. Cheaper quartz versions copy the look with a battery and a recorded call.
Where the cuckoo clock really came from
Nobody knows for certain who made the first one, and early historians did not agree. The German Clock Museum in Furtwangen points to a cuckoo clock listed in 1619 in the inventory of the Elector of Saxony in Dresden, long before the Black Forest made them. In 1650 the scholar Athanasius Kircher described a mechanical organ with a cuckoo whose call came from two pipes with bellows, the same principle still used today.
For the Black Forest itself there are competing stories. A writer in 1810 credited Franz Anton Ketterer of Schönwald, starting in the 1730s, while an earlier account from 1796 named Michael Dilger and Matthäus Hummel, from 1742. One historian argues the mechanism was not invented in the Black Forest at all and goes back to sixteenth-century Italy.
What is certain is the oldest surviving Black Forest example: a clock signed by Johannes Wildi from about 1780 to 1790, now in the German Clock Museum.
The 1850 railway-house design
The shape most people picture today came from a design contest. In September 1850 Robert Gerwig, head of the clockmaking school in Furtwangen, asked for modern clock designs. The winner was Friedrich Eisenlohr, an architect who had designed buildings for the Baden State Railway. He took a model of a railway signalman's house and put a clock dial on its front.
Within about ten years the plain design grew fancier. In 1862 Johann Baptist Beha of Eisenbach began offering richly carved cuckoo clocks with bone hands and weights shaped like fir cones, and the house-style clock soon pushed older cuckoo clocks with painted shield-shaped dials off the market.
Even so, cuckoo clocks were a small part of the region's trade. A Baden-Württemberg tourism history notes they made up only about 3 to 5 percent of Black Forest clock output; the big export was the cheaper painted wall clock.
How a cuckoo clock works inside
A mechanical cuckoo clock is powered by gravity. Weights on chains slowly sink and turn the gears, and you wind the clock by pulling the weights back up. A clock without music has two weights: one runs the time and the other drives the cuckoo. A clock that plays a tune has a third weight for the music box.
The call itself comes from two small wooden pipes, each with a tiny bellows on top. When the hour comes, the movement lifts and drops the bellows one after the other, pushing air through the pipes: the first gives the high note and the second the low one, while a lever swings the bird out of its door.
One-day clocks have small movements and must be wound every day. Eight-day clocks have larger movements and are wound once a week. Many clocks have a switch to silence the bird at night, and some eight-day models do it automatically. Quartz cuckoo clocks run on batteries and make the call and the music electronically.
See also: today's cuckoo clocks, from carved chalets to modern designs on OnlineClock.app.
The world's largest cuckoo clocks
Several giant clocks claim the title, depending on how you measure. In Sugarcreek, Ohio, a clock 23 and a half feet tall and 24 feet wide stands downtown, with a mechanical band that plays polka music on a schedule. It first stood on a hill behind the Alpine Alpa restaurant in nearby Wilmot and appeared on the cover of the 1978 Guinness Book of World Records. Accounts of when it was built differ: the state historical marker says the restaurant commissioned it from clockmaker Karl Schleutermann in 1963.
After the restaurant closed in 2009 and the clock was auctioned, a local cheese company owner bought it and had it moved to Sugarcreek, where the mayor and local helpers keep it running.
In Germany's Black Forest, Schonach and Triberg both have record-style cuckoo clocks you can walk into. Triberg describes the one at the Eble Uhren-Park as a 60-to-1 scale copy of a real cuckoo movement, with a largest wheel 2.6 meters across, an 8-meter pendulum and a weight of 6 tons.
How to tell a genuine Black Forest cuckoo clock
In Germany, the Black Forest Clock Association (Verein die Schwarzwalduhr, or VdS) certifies clocks made in the region in the traditional way. Only clocks with a mechanical movement can get the certificate; quartz clocks do not qualify.
On an older clock, look for a maker's name on the movement or the back, hand-carved rather than molded decoration, wooden bellows and pipes, and weights on chains. A battery compartment means a quartz clock, whatever the case looks like.
See also: what to do when the bird stops calling on OnlineClock.app.
Questions people ask
Is it a cuckoo clock or a coo coo clock?
Cuckoo clock is the correct name, after the bird whose two-note call it copies. Coo coo clock is a common spelling of how it sounds, and people search for both.
How often do you wind a cuckoo clock?
A one-day clock needs its weights pulled up every day. An eight-day clock needs winding once a week. Quartz cuckoo clocks only need new batteries.
Can you stop a cuckoo clock calling at night?
Most mechanical cuckoo clocks have a lever or switch that silences the bird. Some eight-day models switch it off and on automatically each night and morning.
Where is the world's largest cuckoo clock?
Several clocks claim the title. The best known are the giant clock in Sugarcreek, Ohio, and the walk-in clocks in Schonach and Triberg in Germany's Black Forest, which measure in different ways.
Keep exploring
Sources
- The invention of the cuckoo clock, Deutsches Uhrenmuseum (German Clock Museum), Furtwangen
- The history of the famous cuckoo clocks, Visit Baden-Württemberg
- How does a cuckoo clock work?, Bavarian Clockworks
- World's Largest Cuckoo Clock, Ohio Magazine
- Historical marker 24-79: Giant Cuckoo Clock, Remarkable Ohio
- Cuckoo clocks, Triberg im Schwarzwald
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