The “Foolish Device”, or the goats from the Town Hall tower, is one of the biggest tourist attractions of Poznan. Every day at noon, and since recently also at 3 pm, small doors located on the facade of the Town Hall open and two metal goats with horns appear to the crowd below.
A clock with goats was installed on the town hall in September 1551, made by the clockmaker Bartel (Bartłomiej) Wolff from Gubin. The original look of the device is unknown. The clock with goats didn’t work for long and there is no mention of it in archival sources. The townspeople quickly forgot about it. Only at the end of the 19th century, when German historians found a contract with Master Wolff in the archive, it was decided that the goats would return to the tower. The new clock was installed in 1913, during a major renovation of the Town Hall. It is unknown how long the clock with goats was reliable. It is known that the clock mechanism was repaired in 1922 and exactly on August 25, the goats reappeared on the tower. For the whole interwar period they caused trouble: the mechanism did not work too smoothly, which caused the goats to get stuck and not to chime.
They were destroyed in 1945. After the tower was rebuilt and the Town Hall was renovated, they returned to their place in 1954. In 1993, Poznań entrepreneur Marian Marcinkowski donated the city new billy goats, powered by a modern control mechanism designed by Dr. Eng. Stefan Krajewski from the Faculty of Machine Building and Management of the Poznań University of Technology.
