The first cuckoo clocks from the Black Forest

As early as the middle of the 18th century, many small clock workshops in the Black Forest were building cuckoo clocks from wood. The background to this development was the success of wooden clockmaking in the Black Forest. Between about 1750

and 1780, clockmakers succeeded in making production much simpler, so that Black Forest products remained the cheapest wall clocks in the world until the end of the 19th century.

The sturdy wooden clocks were the first timepieces to find their way into the homes and houses of ordinary people on a broad scale. For the first time, it was possible for large sections of the population to own a clock.

The steep drop in price came from cleverly saving on labor and materials. The Black Forest craftsmen simplified the construction of the clocks, used machines, and divided the work among themselves. A dozen or two highly specialized craftsmen, from frame makers to bell and wheel casters, chain makers, dial turners, and painters, supplied the actual clockmaker with highly efficiently produced individual parts. In this way, the number of clocks produced per clockmaker roughly quintupled in the three decades up to 1780, from one clock a week to one a day. Thanks to the low price, demand for Black Forest clocks rose rapidly, so that numerous small workshops emerged in the region around Furtwangen.

Around 1840, there were about a thousand such workshops in the Black Forest, where four to five thousand people built around half a million clocks each year. It is estimated that in the first half of the 19th century alone, about one third of total world clock production - including pocket watches - came from the Black Forest.