The history of Renaissance clockmaking is one of continual improvement of the basic medieval invention. The substitution of a coiled spring for falling weights as the source of power so that clocks could be made portable was an important development of the early fifteenth century. By the second half of the sixteenth century, the major and probably most inventive center of clockmaking was southern Germany, where Nuremberg, Augsburg, and, to a lesser extent, Munich were the chief producers of portable domestic clocks of various kinds.

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