German Horology

German horology's earliest chapter is the disputed Nuremberg tradition of early portable spring-driven clockwork associated (as a historical attribution rather than firmly documented fact) with Peter Henlein in the early sixteenth century, part of a broader South German centre of clock and instrument making in Nuremberg and Augsburg that supplied elaborate table clocks and automata to European courts.

The modern German precision watch industry has a distinct and much later origin: Ferdinand Adolph Lange founded a workshop in the small Saxon town of Glashütte in 1845 with state support, training a generation of watchmakers to a standard rivalling Switzerland and England and establishing the three-quarter plate, gold chaton movement architecture now recognised as the Glashütte style. The Black Forest region, separately, developed a large cottage and later factory-based industry producing wooden-movement and cuckoo clocks for a mass domestic and export market from the eighteenth century onward.

Glashütte production was disrupted by the Second World War and subsequent Soviet-zone reparations and nationalisation, effectively suspending the prestige watchmaking tradition until German reunification in 1990, when A. Lange & Söhne was re-founded by Walter Lange and other Glashütte firms revived; German watchmaking today is dominated by this revived Glashütte prestige sector alongside continuing Black Forest clock production.