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Cuckoo Clock Collection
Filed Under Clock Collectors, Clock News, Cuckoo Clocks, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Cuckoo clock fanatic Roman Piekarski has 561 clocks and claims to have the world’s largest collection of cuckoo clocks. He owns the Cuckooland Museum in Tabley, near Knutsford, Cheshire, UK.
Mr Piekarski says one of his biggest challenges in owning the clocks is getting ready to spend 12 hours either rewinding or fast-forwarding his collection of cuckoo clocks when British Summer Time begins or ends.
Typically he says it takes him about 12 hours to reset the time on all of his 561 clocks each time the time changes.
Mr Piekarski runs the Cuckooland Museum with his brother, Maz. Both men trained as clock-makers from an early age, starting in Manchester when they were 15. They started their interest in cuckoo clocks soon after and set up the museum in 1990 after they had built up their world class collection of clocks.
Some of their cuckoo clocks are very rare:
- They have antique clocks from the Black Forest.
- Their collection has clocks with quails and monks playing bells instead of the usual cuckoos.
- They also have a ‘cuckoo and echo’ clock that emulates the whistles and bellows a cuckoo makes in the wild and is thought to be one of only six in the world.
Find more cuckoo clock information.
The Earliest Clocks
Filed Under Antique Clocks, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Did you know that it wasn’t until recently that we found a need for knowing the time of day. As far as we can determine, it was approximately 5000 to 6000 years ago that civilizations in the Middle East and North Africa began to make clocks.
With the trappings of civilisation - bureaucracies, formal religions, and other social activities, these cultures evidently found they had a need to organize their time more efficiently.
The Sumerian culture appears to have been the first to create a clock but their design was lost without the knowledge being passed on. The Egyptians appear to have been the next to formally divide their day into (something like) hours. They used Obelisks (more commonly recognised as monuments) which were built as early as 3500 BC. The moving shadows of the Obelisks operated as a type of sundial.
Obelisks also showed the year’s longest and shortest days when the shadow at noon was the shortest or longest of the year. These days were often significant from a religious point of view.
Now when did the first alarm clock appear? Was it really done by an inventive Egyptian guy smacking a huge gong on the side of an obelisk? The answer to that question will have to wait for another day. 
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