Cuckoo Clock History

The history of the cuckoo clock has been so jumbled up by inaccurate claims that you might think it goes something like this:

"The cuckoo clock was invented by Orson Welles in Switzerland in 1630. When the notoriously warlike Swiss invaded Germany, the German queen, Marie Antoinette, said, "Let them eat cake!" A German clockmaker delivered the cake to the Swiss four years before he was born. And that's how cuckoo clocks came to the Black Forest and Black Forest cake came to the world."

That's the Mad Libs history of the cuckoo clock. Here's the real story-or at least the plausible one.

The Black Forest's Murky Evidence
Were Black Forest cuckoo clocks the first to be invented? That's what defenders of that region's clock making primacy will tell you. Unfortunately, the chronology is a bit murky. The story has it that in 1630, a German peddler who'd been selling glass in other countries returned to the Black Forest with a "clock" - but not a cuckoo clock. However, the story goes, the Hauslers or poor farmers of the Black Forest took an interest in clock making, and an industry began to develop in the 17th century.

Critics have argued that the man who is widely credited with inventing the cuckoo clock, Franz Anton Ketterer, could not have done so in 1738, as is claimed, because he hadn't been born yet. However, this allegation is incorrect. Ketterer was born in 1676 and died in 1749. Nonetheless, German historians have concluded that the cuckoo clock first appeared in eastern Germany in the early 17th Century.

Ironically, one of the foremost debunkers of the Black Forest/Ketterer origin story is Johannes Graf, director of the German Clock Museum in Furtwangen, which is in the Black Forest region. According to Graf, it wasn't 17th Century peasants who founded the Black Forest clock making industry, but 18th Century woodworkers and metalworkers. Furthermore, according to Graf, the cuckoo clock accounted for just 2% to 3% of the clocks produced during the first two centuries of the Black Forest's enormously successful clock making industry.

What's not in dispute is that both aesthetically and mechanically, today's cuckoo clocks owe a great debt to the Black Forest. The impetus for what is now considered the classic or traditional cuckoo clock came in 1850, when the architect Friedrich Eisenlohr submitted his design for a competition being held by the watch and clockmaking school in Furtwangen. Eisenlohr's design featured a cuckoo mechanism and was inspired by the facade of a railroad guard residence. Just ten years later, the demand for cuckoo clocks had exploded.

What about Switzerland?
The idea that the cuckoo clock originated in Switzerland is attributable primarily to Mark Twain's travel book A Tramp Abroad and a line Orson Welles delivers in director Carol Reed's classic film The Third Man. However, Switzerland did make an important contribution to cuckoo clock history: the chalet cuckoo clock. As one would expect, chalet cuckoo clocks feature a Swiss chalet rather than a Black Forest house.