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In 1850, the director of the Grand Duchy of Baden Clockmakers School, Robert Gerwig, launched a public competition for modern (at the time) designs. While not all German clocks featured the signature cuckoo and coo-coo sound that defines the type, by the late 1700s the sound was inextricably intertwined with the ornate clocks that we all love today.Īs German cuckoo clocks grew in popularity, three clockmakers would rise to become synonymous with cuckoo clocks: Franz Anton Ketterer, Michael Dilger and Matthaus Hummel, who created some of the signature features that are still popular today.
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The clock-master got the idea of how to make the cuckoo-call from the bellows of a church organ" This craftsman adorned a clock with a moving bird that announced the hour with the cuckoo-call. The most reliable story from German history about the provenance of the German Cuckoo Clock comes from a priest, Markus Fidelis Jack, who wrote “"The cuckoo clock was invented (in 1730) by a clock-master from Schönwald. The earliest German cuckoo clocks are believed to be Shield Cuckoo Clocks, and made between 17. By 1669, a clockmaker wrote a handbook on construction of handmade German clocks which suggests “the call of the cuckoo to indicate the hours.”Īlthough it is not clear how clock making was established in the Black Forest of Germany, it soon became the hub of all German cuckoo clock manufacturing. German cuckoo clocks as we now think of them can be traced back to the Black Forest region of Germany in the 1700s, but German prototype cuckoo clock goes all the way back to 1629 and belonged to a Bavarian Prince Elector, August von Sachsen.
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All of the German cuckoo clocks for sale in our marketplace are as unique as our customers that buy them. Some of the most prominent brands we carry, who are all highly esteemed manufacturers of hand-carved and hand-painted German cuckoo clocks include companies like Hand Carved Clocks by Hones, Chalet Clocks by Schneider, Vintage Clocks by Herr, or Modern Cuckoo Clocks by Rombach & Haas, and several more.
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