What Cuckoo Clocks Chime About Success
Mentatrix #13
With each Mentatrix, we take a look at the world outside, and learn more about the world inside.
I still remember my grandma’s cuckoo clock. She cursed it when she was engrossed in story-telling, and all of a sudden the clock would strike and the little bird startled her with its loud cuckoo, cuckoo! Sometimes it sounded like caution, other times like mockery, in the context of her story.
It’s only now, many decades later, that I have tracked the story of cuckoo clocks. The making of.
Although initially Bavarian, it seems, the cuckoo clocks soon became the trademark of the Black Forest, sometime between mid-18th and early 19th century. In 1840 there were about one thousand clock makers, with about five thousand employees, in the Black Forest. (Bear in mind that the Black Forest, with its round 6000 square kilometres, is only slightly larger than Cyprus, and less than half the size of the US state Connecticut.) At the beginning of the 20th century, Junghans, a watch and clock manufacturer in Black Forest’s Schramberg, was the largest one in the world.
In the first half of the 19th century, up to 600,000 clocks were sold yearly. Just under two million clocks were produced in 1870, and three times more in 1905, when the Black Forest’s clocks made up half of the worldwide exports of clocks.
The trends went down in recent decades, mainly due to the technological progress and competition. Still, there is a revival of traditional hand-crafted goods, which has made these clocks increasingly popular again. Options are available between traditional and modern, in terms of both design and mechanism.
But what made this into a success story? The quick answer is usually, because the people making them were so good at it.
Sure. That’s a prerequisite. But reading about the Black Forest cuckoo clocks, it struck me how many distinct factors come into play for a project to become a success.
The skillset
Definitely, there were lots of good clock makers in the region, who combined their talents with wood carvers (just as skilled). They found clever solutions, both engineering and commercial, to make the clocks relatively cheap and easy to produce.
For instance, you could wonder, why a cuckoo and not a rooster, or a singing bird, like a nightingale? The answer is: the cuckoo’s song is only made up of two notes, so putting a cuckoo in the clock required simpler mechanisms, which resulted in lower costs.
Plus, people in the Black Forest thought the cuckoo’s call in the woods to be a good omen. (Not for my grandma’s people: in Transylvania, the superstition went that the number of cuckoo calls you heard at one time was the number of years you still had to live. Might not have always been encouraging.)
The professionals
They were available in the Black Forest, too.
Making a cuckoo clock required combined work: wood carvers, wood painters, clock makers, chain producers. As technology advanced, the crafts became more specialised. These professionals existed in the region (see the figures above), and were often organised in guilds. Later, the production went over to large factories, which again relied on the existing qualified workforce.
The raw material
That was wood. And the Black Forest is, you’re guessing right, a forest. Wood was cheap, by being plenty, by being owned by the local farmers, and by being available at the point of need, in modern vocabulary. This, too, contributed to a convenient end price of the clocks.
The logistics
The clocks were made originally by the local people, during winter, and sold across the Black Forest in spring. The great opportunity, though, was the existing commercial routes of glass makers: wandering traders, carrying the goods on their backs across Europe from Bohemia.
Black Forest clock traders soon took to the trails, carrying the clocks fastened to a wooden frame.
Later, interconnected logistic channels emerged, from different collection points in the Black Forest to Strasbourg, and finally to the rest of the world.
Politics
To stimulate economic prosperity in the poor region around Furtwangen (close to the Danube river springs), the Grand Duchy of Baden commissioned Robert Gerwig to set up a watchmaking school, mid-19th century, which should scale up the production of cuckoo clocks. The school still exists, bearing his name. Gerwig organised a public competition for artists to submit a design for the cuckoo clock’s casing. The winning design was that of a railroad keeper’s house, which established itself (until nowadays) as one of the two main variants of traditional Black Forest cuckoo clocks. The other one is that of a chalet.
Cuckoo clocks were, clearly, not just a hobby activity of skilled craftsmen sitting on the porch of their home and tinkering away at an odd contraption. The clocks became strategic for the development of the region, and the rulers saw that opportunity. That’s how a civilisation flourishes.
The winds of change
The rudimentary sun or sand clocks in use until the 16-17th century evolved into timekeepers based on a mechanical solution, in response to the industrial revolution. The cuckoo clocks were, therefore, the response to the impulse given by the broad historical context.
How can we relate to that, as individuals?
This is a success story. What lies behind it? Obvious, right?, the talent and skill of the craftsmen in the region.
And a commercial flair.
And an infrastructure for professionals to come together and work in projects.
And a handy raw material.
And logistics for distribution.
And policies.
And an alignment with the Zeitgeist.
Fundamentally, an alignment between who we are, what we are skilled at, and what is facilitated by the external opportunities.
I’m asking you to think of projects you have abandoned because you tried, and they “didn’t work”. About aspirations, or quests you have embarked on, but which never seem to achieve fulfilment.
What does all of this have in common? We tend to take them as a one-variable equation, forgetting that any endeavour coagulates a multitude of factors that work together like an organism, heading for success of failure.
The project failed? “It’s because the idea was bad.”
What if the idea was brilliant, but it was implemented wrong? With the wrong people. At the wrong time. In the wrong context. With insufficient backing. Linked poorly to what other similar things were out there. Lacking a clear target. With a fuzzy messaging to the outside world. With less-than-optimal investment of focus, creativity, or persuasion. (The list is endless.)
Life quests that never seem to achieve fulfilment? “It’s because it’s not possible.”
What if the quest was achievable, but we have failed to address it strategically? For example, if we are on a quest for stability and security,
Security? What is that, how do I define it for me? What exactly about it would make me happy? Is what I think I want what I really need, what would really fulfil me? Are there other needs in me that might conflict with it? Looking outside, around me, what would it take to build a stable / secure life, if I’m living in a world of continuous disruption and change? How much security would be the minimum? Who (as a specific person, as an agent, or as an entity) can help me achieve that? And so on.
Someone taught me a self-interrogation technique many years ago. I can’t provide the proper attribution, I’m afraid; besides, I’m also slightly adapting it here, as my memory is not 100% intact.
Ask yourself a question, such as Why is family life important to me?
Draw a circle and its four quadrants. Put one answer in each quadrant. For example:
Now take each of the four answers, and ask the question: Why does it make me feel safe? Draw a circle, and its quadrants. Provide four answers. And so on.
Then take the second answer from the circle above, and draw a circle for the question: Why (in what way) does it make me feel loved?
You can take this analysis down to the level you feel it makes sense. You’re in for some surprises reflecting on these questions, and some challenges, too!
You may choose to spiral down on the question Why, or on another of your choice: In what way? How can I...? What do I need to get this right?
This reflection habit, whether using the technique above or any amount of pondering during a beautiful sunset, helps in several ways.
It helps define the real problem when things go wrong. And this, in turn, helps us make the right decisions: whether to persist, what to change, or whether to stop trying.
It helps us manage expectations. We might have a talent, but talent is not the only ingredient needed for any given project.
It helps us address quests, wants, aspirations, projects strategically. Seeking the alignment of the various elements involved, we create synergies that fire the great show of fulfilment.
Finally, it helps us scrutinize our motifs for conflicting wants and needs, or our skillset for incongruous talents and temperamental traits.
Such a self-reflection practice would have been no good for my grandma, if she’d wanted to identify why she’d got the cuckoo clock in the first place. To her, the answer would have been simple: it had belonged to the family since the boom of the early 1900s.
Very thought provoking plus I learned a lot about cuckoo clocks. The 2 vs 3 notes is great detail!