Novelty clocks with eyes that tell time are usually made to run one day only. A very few examples can be found with eight-day running movements. A wide variety of animals and objects made with rolling eyes make this kind of animation very collectible.

By far, the most popular of these charming collectibles is the Scottie dog in addition to the owl. There were also human skulls, gnomes, monkeys, cats, lions and so on. . .

It is believed that most of the rolling eye clocks were made by the J. Oswald company in the Black Forest of Germany. The earliest are carved hardwood, but after WWII, many examples are moulded materials similar to that used in the Lux and Keebler novelty clocks.

The exact origin and age of these clocks is not easy to determine. We know that they came from Germany, but very few details are available in writing, due to the destruction of records during WWII. For this reason we have to rely on bits and pieces of information gleaned from many sources to come up with some sort of history of these novelty items.

Most were made by the Oswald company in the Freiburg area which is in the Black Forest area of Germany. We say most, because we have three rolling eye clocks that we cannot, with certainty, attribute to Oswald. However, a personal friend has a wooden rolling eye clock marked "U.S. Patent 1926 Made in Germany." So, if patents were effective in those days, it is reasonable to assumme that Oswald may have made our "unmarked" ones as well.

We do have a very nice, large, wood Scottie clock (No. 3 on this page), which does not hhave any reference to Oswald; indeed, it is mechanized entirely differently. It has a metal plaque on the back reading, "Joh s Hartmann Hofuhrmacher, Gegrundet 1736 BerlinNW 7, U.d.Linden 56. Could this Herr Hartmann, watch maker to the Court and located on the very elite Unter den Linden Stree in Berlin, could he have been some sort of competition to Mr. Oswald? Who knows. If he was or intended to be, he could not have been very sucessful, since this is the only item we have ever seen or heard of with his name on it! The last known address of the Oswald company was J. Oswald 17b Freiburg (inner circle) Br. Hansjakobstr. 98. We wonder what is there now.

The time frame for these clocks was from the late 1920s through the early 1960s. The models made in the 50s and 60s are usually in plaster, the earlier ones were wood. There is a substantial weight difference between a wood and a plaster clock of the same model. There were many different designs for these clocks. Dogs were the most popular followed by owls. How many different designs and color scheme there were is hard to say, but we know of one collector who has 150 rolling eye clocks that include Indians, gnomes, cats, lions, as well as Sheiks.

Please note: all of these clocks are shown here at the same scale realetive to one another.