German Clock Museum

Clockmaking developed in the Black Forest from the seventeenth century as winter work for farming households, using wooden gears and local skills, and grew into an export industry selling across Europe. The museum in Furtwangen holds around eight thousand objects and traces the trade from wooden movements through the cuckoo clock to industrial production and quartz. The familiar carved-house cuckoo clock is a nineteenth-century design: a competition held in 1850 by the clockmaking school in Furtwangen sought new casings, and the railway-house pattern that won became the standard form now taken as traditional.

What you actually see

• The wooden movements - early Black Forest clocks with wooden gears.
• The 1850 competition - the origin of the familiar cuckoo clock casing.
• The industrial phase - mass production and the export trade.
• The mechanical music - orchestrions and automatic instruments in the collection.

When to go

Year-round; the museum closes on some winter days. It is quiet compared with the tourist clock shops elsewhere in the region and better on the subject.

Honest expectations

Furtwangen is a working town with little else for visitors. The museum is technical in places. Displays are labelled in German with English summaries.

Nearby

Triberg lies west; Villingen is east.