Clock by Martens und Cie., Germany, 1860 (German Clock Museum Museu_ProvidedCHO_museum_digital_58055__technical_number_)

Record summary

Held and catalogued by German Clock Museum (object number Museu_ProvidedCHO_museum_digital_58055__technical_number_), this is a clock by Martens und Cie., made in Furtwangen im Schwarzwald, Germany, dated 1860. The Atlas places it in the Industrial Revolution period (1850 – 1900) of its Clocks collection. The record is illustrated with 1 photograph.

Assembled from the source record's structured fields. Dates and attributions are given as the source states them; where a field is missing the Atlas leaves it blank rather than estimating.

Catalogue description

Atlas type guide

Black Forest and cuckoo clocks

Clockmaking spread through the Black Forest in south-west Germany in the late seventeenth century as a winter occupation for farming families. Early clocks had wooden plates and wheels and a foliot ('Waaguhr') or short pendulum, with a painted wooden shield dial; pedlars (Uhrenträger) carried them across Europe. The cuckoo clock, which imitates the bird's call with two small bellows-driven pipes, appeared in the mid-eighteenth century.

The industry was organised around Furtwangen, Triberg, Schwenningen and Lenzkirch. The Furtwangen clockmaking school (1850) introduced the railway-house cuckoo clock design, and from the late nineteenth century factories such as Junghans, Kienzle and Hamburg-Amerikanische Uhrenfabrik produced clocks by the million. The German Clock Museum in Furtwangen preserves the region's history.

General guidance written by the Atlas editors about this kind of object. It is not a statement about this particular piece; for that, rely on the source record above and on physical examination.

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