Musée d'Horlogerie du Locle, Technology museum in Le Locle, Switzerland.
The Musée d'Horlogerie du Locle occupies the Château des Monts, a small country manor built between 1780 and 1790 about one kilometre north of the town centre on a hill. Its ground floor holds a dense technical history of the watch movement, while the park-like garden displays several sundials, large sculptural clocks and a replica of al-Jazari's Elephant clock.
The Château des Monts was built between 1780 and 1790 for the Dubois family. The watchmaker Georges Ducommun bought it in 1912 and laid out its English garden; in 1954 his daughter sold the estate to the municipality of Le Locle, which installed the watch museum there, opened on 23 May 1959. The manor is listed as a Swiss cultural property of national significance.
The museum's name comes from Le Locle, a town long tied to watchmaking, and its collections reflect that trade: Swiss automatons with mechanical music and singing birds from the 18th and 19th centuries, marquetry clock cases by Charles André Boulle, and Neuchâtel-style pendules. A small auditorium shows a video of the automatons in motion, since the pieces themselves are not run for visitors.
The museum sits in the Château des Monts on a hill about one kilometre north of Le Locle's centre, so the visit is easiest on foot or by car rather than on a town-centre stroll. The horological library, which holds Alfred Chapuis's research archives and Tardy's former library, opens to scholars by appointment only. Many visitors pair the museum with the Musée international d'horlogerie in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a few kilometres east.
In the park-like garden stand several sundials and large sculptural clocks, among them a replica of the Elephant clock of al-Jazari, the 12th-century water clock described by the engineer al-Jazari in his Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices. The museum has held a biannual chronometry competition since 2009.
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