Gustav Becker

Gustav Becker established a clockmaking workshop in Freiburg in Silesia in 1847 that grew, over the following decades, into one of the largest clock manufacturers in nineteenth-century Germany, producing wall regulators, mantel clocks, and later mass-market household clocks that were exported widely across Europe, paralleling the roughly contemporaneous industrialisation of clockmaking led by firms such as Junghans in the Black Forest.

Becker's firm was particularly noted for good-quality Vienna-regulator-style wall clocks produced on an industrial scale, bringing a standard of movement finishing associated with the earlier, more individually crafted Vienna regulator tradition to a much larger and more affordable production run, and the firm received a number of period trade honours and exhibition awards reflecting its standing in the German clock industry of the era.

The firm continued after Becker's death under later ownership into the twentieth century, eventually becoming linked with other German clock manufacturing concerns; detailed personal biography of Gustav Becker beyond the founding and early growth of the firm is comparatively limited in general horological reference literature relative to the extensive surviving output of clocks bearing his name.