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About Time in Germany

The Watch That Was Faked to Prove It Was First

A Nuremberg locksmith named Peter Henlein is popularly credited with building the first portable timepiece around 1505, a small drum-shaped case known later as the Nuremberg Egg, worn on a chain or carried in a pouch rather than mounted on a wall or tower. The claim rests mainly on a single line written in 1511 by the scholar Johann Cochläus, who marvelled that Henlein, still a young man, made devices that even learned mathematicians admired. Henlein was certainly among the first craftsmen anywhere to build small spring-driven clocks worn on the body, and he later built a tower clock and a celestial globe for the city council, but historians have never been able to confirm that he personally invented the mainspring or was uniquely first, since other German workshops were producing comparably small mechanisms around the same years.

The uncertainty took an unexpected turn in the twentieth century. In 1897 the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg acquired a small oval watch inscribed on its back cover with the maker's name and the date 1510. For decades the object was displayed, cautiously, as physical proof of Henlein's achievement. Museum specialists had doubted it since at least 1930, and modern research, including computed tomography of the case, confirmed that the signature had been engraved later, scratched over older wear marks in a way no genuine sixteenth-century inscription would show. The watch itself may still be an early German timepiece, but the inscription that made it famous was a forgery, leaving Henlein's claim to priority resting on the same slender written record it always had.

Every 17.7 Kilometres, the Clock Changed by a Minute

Before 1893, travelling across the German states meant resetting one's watch every time a train crossed into new territory, since each town kept its own solar noon: Munich ran about eleven minutes behind Berlin, Cologne roughly twenty-four minutes behind, and the gap shifted by about a minute for every 17.7 kilometres travelled east or west. Railways had already tried to impose order from below. Prussia and Alsace-Lorraine ran their trains on Berlin time from the 1870s, and from 1 June 1891 a Central European Railway Time, shared with Austria-Hungary, governed timetables even though station clocks outside the ticket hall often still showed local time.

The patchwork ended by imperial decree. On 16 March 1893 Kaiser Wilhelm signed the law fixing legal time across the German Reich to the mean solar time of the fifteenth meridian east of Greenwich, effective from the stroke of midnight on 1 April that year. The chosen meridian happens to pass almost exactly through the eastern city of Görlitz, whose town park still holds a stone globe marking the line, erected in 1961 on, by coincidence, the same spring in which Yuri Gagarin made his first orbital flight. Even after unification, confusion over morning and evening hours persisted on the railways for another generation: from the 1890s until 15 May 1927, German train tickets and timetables underlined the minute figures for night departures, between six in the evening and six the next morning, rather than switching outright to a 24-hour clock, so a ticket reading a plain 735 meant a morning train and an underlined 735 meant the same time after dark.

The World's First Nation to Save Daylight

Wartime scarcity, not sporting enthusiasm, brought clock-shifting to Germany first. The idea of extending evening daylight to cut fuel use had circulated since before the war, championed in Britain by the builder William Willett, but it was the German government, squeezed by a British naval blockade that had cut off coal and oil supplies, which acted first. The Federal Council issued the order on 6 April 1916, and at eleven o'clock on the night of 30 April clocks across the empire were moved forward one hour, making Imperial Germany the first country in the world to introduce nationwide daylight saving time as government policy.

Austria-Hungary followed within days, and Britain adopted its own summer time three weeks later, on 21 May, with France close behind. The measure lasted through the war years but was dropped in Germany in 1919 once peacetime supplies resumed, only to be revived under different justifications twice more in the twentieth century, during the Second World War and again from 1980 onward in response to the oil crises of the 1970s, this time as a European-wide coordinated measure rather than a unilateral wartime economy.

A Cuckoo With No Verified Father

Clockmaking became a rural cottage industry in the Black Forest from the mid-seventeenth century, when farming families supplemented thin winter incomes by building wooden-geared clocks, at first copying styles that had arrived from Bohemia along local glass-trading routes. Wood was cheap and, in the early years, one of the few materials guild regulations allowed a clockmaker outside the metalworking trades to use, so the earliest surviving examples run on gears cut from local timber rather than brass.

The cuckoo clock, the region's most famous export, is popularly traced to a clockmaker named Franz Anton Ketterer, said to have built the first one in the Black Forest village of Schönwald in the 1730s after hearing the bellows of a church organ. The story only appears in print from a self-published book in 1979, and specialists at Germany's national clock museum in Furtwangen, along with the country's watch and clock collectors' association, have since found no earlier evidence to support it; bird-call clocks with bellows-driven whistles are documented in the region from around the same decades but without a traceable single inventor. What is well documented is the industry's scale rather than its founding myth: by the years before the First World War, Black Forest workshops, later joined by larger factories such as Junghans and Kienzle in the Württemberg towns of Schramberg and Schwenningen, accounted for roughly sixty percent of the world's export trade in clocks.

The Second That Travels Two Thousand Kilometres

Legal time in the Federal Republic today is generated not by a public radio announcer but by a longwave transmitter in the small Hessian town of Mainflingen, operated on behalf of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, the national metrology institute in Braunschweig. The station, known by its call sign DCF77, began broadcasting a steady 77.5 kilohertz reference frequency on 1 January 1959; full date and time information was added to the signal only in June 1973. Every second, the transmitter's 50-kilowatt carrier is briefly cut, and the exact length of that dip encodes a binary digit, sixty of them making up each minute's full time code.

The signal, generated from the institute's caesium and rubidium clocks and injected into the antenna at the transmission site itself rather than piped there by cable, can be received up to roughly 2,000 kilometres from Mainflingen, reaching most of Europe. It has become the invisible standard behind German life in ways few users notice: it sets the platform clocks of Deutsche Bahn, drives the ferrite-antenna radio clocks that became popular across the continent from the late 1980s, and remains, under a 1978 federal law, the only source of time recognised as legally binding in Germany.

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