According to tradition, in the mid-17th century a glass peddler - one of the traders who carried Black Forest glassware across Europe - brought a clock home from abroad. It was copied at the Glashof in Waldau. So the people of the Black Forest didn't invent the clock. But they did something clever: they built it out of wood.

That was the stroke of genius. Metal clocks were guild goods, expensive and reserved for the cities. Wooden clocks, on the other hand, could be built by anyone - and they were so affordable that suddenly farmers and ordinary citizens could afford a clock too.

Then came a second idea, far ahead of its time: division of labour. It wasn't one clockmaker who built the whole clock, but many specialists working together - frame makers, chain makers, dial painters, carvers. By around 1800, some 150,000 clocks a year were already leaving Black Forest parlours.

And the cuckoo? The Black Forest still argues about its birth hour today - about as passionately as it argues over the best cherry cake recipe.

Chronicler Markus Fidelis Jäck wrote in 1810 that Franz Anton Ketterer of Schönwald built the first cuckoo clocks in the early 1730s - inspired by the bellows of a church organ. Father Franz Steyrer, however, had already reported in 1796 that Michael Dilger of Neukirch and Matthäus Hummel of Glashütten had built the clock earlier still.

Only one thing is certain: the idea may have come from elsewhere - but it was perfected in the Black Forest. Two small organ pipes, one high and one low, blown by two bellows - that's all it takes for the unmistakable "cuck-oo".

Curious but true: when Anton Schneider founded his manufactory, the cuckoo clock didn't yet look like "the cuckoo clock" at all. Back then, the cuckoo called from plain, painted dial clocks.

That changed two years after the company was founded. In 1850 the Grand Ducal Baden Clockmaking School was founded in Furtwangen. The most consequential design in the resulting competition came from architect Friedrich Eisenlohr: the "railway-house clock" - a clock shaped like a small house with a gabled roof.

The design was a sensation, rarely matched in the history of product design. From the 1860s onward, the little houses were carved ever more elaborately: vine leaves, oak leaves, hunting motifs, forest animals, weights shaped like pine cones. This form - born from a competition in 1850 - remains the epitome of the cuckoo clock to this day.

In 1952 the family took the big step: moving from the farmhouse into its own factory building on Triberger Strasse in Schonach. Across seven construction phases the site was expanded until 1985 - joinery, wood carving, clock assembly and final inspection all under one roof. Anton Schneider Söhne became one of the largest and most modern cuckoo-clock manufactories in the Black Forest.

The range grew to around 300 models: from the 19-centimetre entry-level model to a three-metre showpiece clock. Hunting pieces with stag heads and oak leaves, chalets with millwheels, beer-garden scenes and dancing figures. In 2007 the "Watzmannhaus" model was named "Cuckoo Clock of the Year".

Then, in August 2025, came the news nobody wanted to hear: Anton Schneider Söhne had to file for insolvency. 177 years of family history, 14 employees, a factory in Schonach - and a market that had changed. It was not a sudden collapse, but the end of a long struggle against structural changes that had gripped an entire industry.

For a moment it seemed as though one of the oldest names in cuckoo clocks would fall silent forever.