<P> On the other side, R. Dorer pointed out, in 1948, that Franz Anton Ketterer (1734--1806) could not have been the inventor of the cuckoo clock in 1730 because he had not yet been born . </P> <P> This statement was corroborated by Gerd Bender in the most recent edition of the first volume of his work Die Uhrenmacher des hohen Schwarzwaldes und ihre Werke (The Clockmakers of the High Black Forest and their Works) (1998) in which he wrote that the cuckoo clock was not native to the Black Forest and also stated that: "There are no traces of the first production line of cuckoo clocks made by Ketterer". </P> <P> However, Schaaf in Schwarzwalduhren (Black Forest Clocks) (1995), provides his own research which leads to the earliest cuckoos having been built in the Franken - Niederbayern area ("Franconia and Lower Bavaria", in the southeast of Germany, forming nowadays the northern two - thirds of the Free State of Bavaria), in the direction of Bohemia (nowadays the main region of the Czech Republic), which he notes, lends credence to the Steyrer version . </P> <P> The legend that the cuckoo clock was invented by a clever Black Forest mechanic in 1730 (Franz Anton Ketterer) keeps being told over and over again . But all of this is not true . This type of clock is much older than clockmaking in the Black Forest . As early as 1650 the bird with the distinctive call was part of the reference book knowledge recorded in handbooks . It took nearly a century for the cuckoo clock to find its way to the Black Forest, where for many decades it remained a tiny niche product . </P>

Who created the first wooden clock with chimes