Letters: Cuckoo clock myth

Cuckoo clock myth

Sir: I too admire The Third Man ("Third Man heads list of century's top British movies", 23 September) but as a Swiss let me put the record straight regarding that scene.

At the time the film was made Switzerland had had 100 years of peace (since 1848), not 500. Cuckoo clocks come from Germany (the Black Forest) and not Switzerland. Typical Swiss products are the Reformation (Geneva, Basle, Neuchatel and Zurich), political theory, romanticism and the French Revolution (Rousseau), mathematics and physics (Euler and the Bernoullis), psychology (Piaget), medicine and pharmacology (Paracelsus), theology (Zwingli, Farel, Barth, Kueng), architecture( Le Corbusier), linguistics, semiotics and structuralism (de Saussure) and psychiatry (Jung).

Professor STEPHEN SENN

Harpenden,

Hertfordshire