ZoHaIb TRiQs wOrLd: Coo Coo Clock

Coo Coo Clock

It is not clear who built the first coo coo clocks in the black forest but there is unanimity that the unusual clock with the bird call very quickly conquered the region. Already by the middle of the 18th century, several small clockmaking shops produced coo coo clocks with wooden gears. So the first Black Forest examples were created between 1740 and 1750. They had hand-painted shields.
It is hard to judge how large the proportion of coo coo clocks was among the total production of modern movement Black Forest clocks. Based on the proportions of pieces surviving to the present, it must have been a small fraction of the total production.
Regarding its murky origins, there are two main fables from the first two chroniclers of Black Forest horology which tell contradicting stories about it:
The first is from Father Franz steyrer, written in his "Geschichte der Schwarzwälder Uhrmacherkunst" (History of Clockmaking in the Black Forest) in 1796. He describes a meeting between two clock peddlers from Furtwangen (a town in the Black Forest) who met a travelling Bohemian merchant who sold wooden cuckoo clocks. Both the Furtwangen traders were so excited that they bought one.