- Nuremberg eggs
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Peter Henlein made watches in Nuremberg at the beginning of the sixteenth century and these are commonly called Nuremberg eggs. This name is regarded as a myth, resulting from a mistranslation of a sentence in Rabelais. He mentioned little clocks (ueurlein) and "the translator mistook this for eierlein, little eggs".[1]
As the translator would have been reading the French text he could not have misinterpreted the French word (perhaps montre or petite horloge). Either he wrote eierlein erroneously (which is unlikely) or the mistake was made by the German typesetter misreading the hand-written text.
References
- ^ For example: Bruton, Eric, The History of Clocks and Watches, 1979, page 109.
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