Cuckoo Clocks - The Yesteryear Embellishment To Your Home
The very word reminds you of your grandfather's home, a huge dilapidated mansion with its endless hallways, huge rooms, long corridors and peeling paint. If this is the case, eight out of ten times, you'll find a cuckoo clock hanging on one of the walls, the cuckoo coming out of its nest and hooting every hour to remind the world of a new hour. Yes, cuckoo clocks are almost out of fashion these days, the more posh fashionable electronic driven clocks taking their place, but they were once very much in vogue among nobility and the respected class. Every mansion would have an elaborately embellished cuckoo clock. It was a status symbol, very much like a Rolls Royce, a silver tea set, a 100 year old vintage French wine, etc. Cuckoo clocks were initially developed around the year 1737 in the Black Forest region of Germany. Rumors have it that it was actually made well before that time in other areas as well. Actually, many years before the manufacture of the first cuckoo clocks, a nobleman named Philip Hainhofer had spoken about a cuckoo clock belonging to Prince Elector August von Sachsen. The first literary reference to the cuckoo clock comes from the handbook on music, "Musurgia Universalis" where the scholar Athanasius Kircher illustrates a cuckoo clock. He articulately described the mechanism of the cuckoo as well as the clock. The cuckoo within the clock flaps its wings and simultaneously lets out a "cuk-coo" sound. The handbook of elementary clocks, "Horologi Elementari" compiled by Domenico Martinelli in the year 1669 suggests the periodic action of the cuckoo at every hour. A few decades later, cuckoo clocks began coming up in the area known as the Black Forest in Germany. Though it wasn't the people of Black Forest who first designed cuckoo clocks, they are still ascribed to this region due to the fact that these people first industrialized the cuckoo clocks i.e., they made it a commercial product and began manufacturing cuckoo clocks.
Today, cuckoo clocks are available as exotic decorative showpieces preferred by collectors. One can see elaborately decorated cuckoo clocks hanging on the walls of posh bungalows. Though they look a little out of place in today's electronic world, they remind us of the beauty and workmanship of the past craftsmen. Various models of cuckoo clocks are available for sale on the Internet. The website www.cuckooclocks.com provides a detailed description of different types of cuckoo wall clock. For example, a cuckoo clock, four leaves, feeding birds and nest with a one day running time is available for 209.59 USD. A cuckoo clock with seven leaves, three birds and an eight day running time, walnut in color, measuring 33 cm (13 inch) costs 279.33 USD. Some original antique3 clocks are valuable and as such it is worth referring them to experts if they are in need of repair. With the advent of newer models of electronic clocks one might think that such old time cuckoo clocks would be pushed to the backstage. Yet, they have survived the electronic boom and still adorn the mantelpiece or wall of mansions and homes where the owners still appreciate this wonderful type of clock.
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