The cuckoo clock is a worldwide symbol of the Black Forest. How it got there is less romantic and considerably more interesting than most accounts suggest: it is the product of long winters, poor soil and a region that turned necessity into an industry.
The precondition: wood, winter and time
In the 17th and 18th centuries the farms of the central Black Forest lived from meagre agriculture. Winters were long, work in the fields stopped for months, and one raw material was abundant: wood. In the farmhouse parlours a cottage industry grew out of it – first carvings and wooden implements, then clocks.
The early Black Forest clocks were wooden-geared clocks: wheels, arbors and cases made of wood, with at most a few metal parts. They could be made by hand with simple tools. That is exactly what turned them into an export product.
The cuckoo joins in
The idea of a clock that calls is older than the Black Forest as a clockmaking region. Bird-call mechanisms are documented considerably earlier, and the principle of two tuned wooden pipes with bellows was known in Europe. The Black Forest did not invent the cuckoo call – but from the middle of the 18th century it produced it in series and combined it with case-making. That combination – mechanical clock, bellows call, carved wooden case – is what is genuinely Black Forest about it.
1850: the Bahnhäusle and a competition
Around 1850 the regional clock trade was under pressure: cheap competition, dated designs. The clockmaking school in Furtwangen responded with a competition for new case designs. Out of it came the design that still defines the cuckoo clock today – the Bahnhäusle, modelled on the signalman's cottages of the newly built railway lines.
With that, the cuckoo clock was no longer just a timekeeper but a designed object with a recognisable signature. From the Bahnhäusle came the carved foliage clock and the figure-rich chalet.
The clock peddlers
At first the clocks were sold by clock peddlers: traders who walked across Europe with a carrying frame full of clocks – as far as Scandinavia, Russia and Turkey. They were on the road for months and brought back not only money but requests for particular designs. The fact that Black Forest clocks exist with motifs aimed at very different markets goes back to this period.
From parlour work to manufactory
During the 19th century the trade professionalised. Home work became workshops, workshops became manufactories with a division of labour: movement building, case building, carving, painting, final assembly and regulating.
Anton Schneider founded his workshop in Schonach in 1848; the company has been in family hands without interruption ever since and produces today in Gütenbach – now in the sixth generation. The division of the work steps has stayed essentially the same, even though machines now handle the preparatory stages. Carving, painting, assembly and regulating are still done by hand.
The 20th century: quartz and imports
Two developments hit the industry. From the 1970s onwards quartz technology made mechanical clocks unnecessary as timekeepers – anyone who only wanted the time no longer needed a pendulum. And from the 1980s cuckoo-clock-shaped products arrived from the Far East that had nothing to do with Black Forest construction.
In response, the Verein die Schwarzwalduhr was founded, which since then has issued a certificate of authenticity for mechanical clocks demonstrably made in the Black Forest.
Why the clock still exists
Because its value has shifted. Nobody buys a cuckoo clock today to find out the time. What is bought is an object in which you can see that people worked on it – and a sound that changes a room.
The number of businesses that still master this has become small. How we work is shown on our craftsmanship and history pages; our current models are in the overview of all cuckoo clocks.