the cuckoo clock
The first Black Forest cuckoo clock was designed and manufactured by Franz Anton Ketterer in the small town of Schönwald near Triberg, Germany, deep in the Black Forest. Ketterer managed to reproduce the call of the cuckoo through the clever use of bellows that produced two different sounds. During the following years, the watch industry developed rapidly in the Black Forest. With their ingenuity, cunning and skill, the inhabitants of the region used the long winter months in the manufacture of cuckoo clocks with rich decorations carved by hand in various woods. In 1808 there were already 688 watchmakers and 582 itinerant watch sellers in the districts of Triberg and Neustadt. During the long winter months, farms were covered in snow and people had plenty of time to create finely crafted cuckoo clocks of many styles with rich and varied carvings.
The first clocks in the Black Forest, called “wooden beam clocks”, were built around the year 1640, on a farm called Glashof. The watches were made entirely of wood, including the movements. These original clocks evolved in the early 18th century into clocks known as “Schilderuhr”, which added hand painting, a minute hand and chimes.
Around the world, the cuckoo clock is considered a symbol of the Black Forest. Since the 18th century, watchmakers in their region have specialized in making this type of watch. The cuckoo clock became known around the world thanks to the “watch-bearing” peddlers of the Black Forest who literally carried the clocks on their backs in rucksacks. The first model of a cuckoo clock was a painted wooden clock. The clock was composed of a nearly square board for the clock face and a raised semicircle, and was lavishly decorated. The cuckoo itself was in the semicircle behind a small door. This type of clock was made from around 1730 and was considered to be the specific style of clock for the Black Forest. However, the exact origin of the cuckoo clock is not entirely clear to this day. In the mid-19th century there were two main visual forms of the cuckoo clock. The “framed clock”, as its name suggests, had a strong wooden frame and a wide painted inner section to which the clock face was attached. The cuckoo was situated on top of the decorated surface and was occasionally included in the other decorative scenes. The basic form in the form of a house with wooden decorative elements was developed to include scenes of everyday life. The first such watch had a wooden dial with white numbers and hands and weights in the shape of a fir cone. This day. Vine leaves, forest animals and plants, as well as hunting scenes are characteristic of this typical cuckoo clock shape. Dancing couples in traditional dress move automatically to the beat of the music or the mill wheel turns every hour, while a farmer chops wood. The cuckoo itself moves its wings and beak and sways from side to side when it calls. Despite fluctuations in demand on the clock market, cuckoo clock production in the Black Forest has remained uninterrupted to this day.
the cuckoo bird
The cuckoo can be found in Africa, Asia and northern Europe. They are slim-bodied and about 13 inches long. They have a bluish-gray head, chest, and upperparts, and horizontal bars on the underparts. However, the female also exists as a rare rufous (reddish) morph, so instead of being gray it is reddish-brown. They never build a nest, preferring instead to lay their eggs in the nests of other birds who unknowingly raise the cuckoo chicks as their own.