Black Forest Cuckoo Clocks

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Time flies. Time travel. Time to go. What time is it?

Have you ever thought about the origin of time? When did we start to care about time and why? When was the sun no longer good enough to tell time?

“You can explain how time is measured when you understand how a cuckoo clock works,” explained Reinhard Herr.

For me the best kind of travel is the kind where you learn something. While on my Made in Germany road trip, I was able to learn about the origins of many products that I had a lifetime of exposure to, but never knew why. My journey started with the cuckoo clock.

The Herr family knows a lot about time, as the Herr’s have been making cuckoo clocks from the Black Forest in Germany for 5 generations. There’s something magical about cuckoo clocks, they have survived the test of time for hundreds of years and are still in demand. In a time when people hardly even wear watches any longer thanks to the invention of the smart phone, somehow the pure mechanical cuckoo clock is still around and cherished in many homes.

I remember my childhood home’s cuckoo clock that my dad was always tinkering with. My grandparent’s farmhouse also had a cuckoo clock, it was always there, in the background keeping us in sync and moving us along through the day. I never really understood what the fascination was with cuckoo clocks until I walked into the Hubert Herr factory in the Black Forest town of Triberg Germany.