Franz Anton Ketterer (1676–1749) was a German

clock A clock or a timepiece is a device used to measure and indicate time. The clock is one of the oldest human inventions, meeting the need to measure intervals of time shorter than the natural units such as the day, the lunar month and the ...

maker. Ketterer, one of the founding fathers of the

Black Forest The Black Forest (german: Schwarzwald ) is a large forested mountain range in the state of Baden-Württemberg in southwest Germany, bounded by the Rhine Valley to the west and south and close to the borders with France and Switzerland. It is t ...

clockmaking industry in Germany, was born in the village of . He is chiefly remembered as one of the earliest makers of

cuckoo clock A cuckoo clock is, typically, a pendulum clock that strikes the hours with a sound like a common cuckoo call and has an automated cuckoo bird that moves with each note. Some move their wings and open and close their beaks while leaning forwards ...

s in the

. His family carried on the business of clockmaking, and his German descendants continue to manufacture

weather Weather is the state of the atmosphere, describing for example the degree to which it is hot or cold, wet or dry, calm or stormy, clear or cloudy. On Earth, most weather phenomena occur in the lowest layer of the planet's atmosphere, the ...

instruments. There is an interesting myth surrounding Ketterer. Not much can be found on the Internet about him or his work. A very old thread speaks of the myth *1) and names a source: Deutsches Uhrenmuseum (German clock museum) has stated: "In 1810 Markus Fidelis Jaeck wrote in his book 'Darstellungen der Industrie und des Verkehrs auf dem Schwarzwald' that Franz (Anton) Ketterer of Furtwangen invented the cuckoo clock around 1730. But this story cannot be true. Franz Anton Ketterer was born in 1734 and died in 1806". The village of Schönwald dedicated a street to the clockmaker Ketterer (Uhrmacher-Ketterer-Strasse) and names Franziskus Ketterer (1676 - 2.7.1753 in Schönwald) as the inventor of the cuckoo clock. When digging into the origin of wooden cuckoo clocks, there is much more to be found of what could almost be called "the founders of a reborn clock industry", Simon Dilger and his son Johann Friedrich Dilger. In a German text *2) it is mentioned that Anton Ketterer was son of Franz Ketterer. Maybe the confusion of the dates of births stem from mixing these two people's lives? According to another German text *3) Simon Dilger was the teacher of Anton Ketterer. There is no single conclusion to the question of who invented the cuckoo clock, but it is probably true that Ketterer was a major player in their development.

External links

Franz Ketterer Meteorologie
official site *1 http://mb.nawcc.org/showthread.php?17847-About-Cuckoo-Clocks-history *2 http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/ADB:Dilger,_Simon *3 http://www.schollach.de/index.php/uhrmacherei 1676 births 1749 deaths German clockmakers People from Schwarzwald-Baar-Kreis {{Germany-engineer-stub