Glashütte is to German timekeeping what Napa Valley is to American wine making. A tiny town in Saxony, and about an hour’s drive from Dresden, it is home to one of the world’s discreet uberwatch manufacturers, A. Lange & Söhne. The company makes timepieces that do not shout for attention, instead creating quiet masterpieces that make a statement. Like any item of true luxury, watches define personal style. Lange is, in a nutshell, complicatedly classic.
The latest wristwear from the company to seduce the horological taste of sophisticated gentlemen is the Richard Lange Jumping Seconds watch, which applies traditional solutions to contemporary time machine needs—a true sign of haute horology, honed by centuries of creative pedigree. It is the latest in the Richard Lange family of watches launched in 2006, that pays homage to Lange watches made for scientific expeditions and navigation. Predecessors are the Richard Lange Pour Le Merite, the Richard Lange Tourbillon Pour Le Merite and the most complicated watch in the series, the spectacular Terraluna Perpetual Calendar. Of course, the star of 2017 is the Tourbograph Perpetual “Pour le Mérite”, that has been issued in a limited edition of 50 pieces.
It is a magical combination of five complications from an assemblage of 684 parts. The Lange watchmakers must have applied the hair trigger sensitiveness of a nuclear physicist and a microbiologist’s eye for detail in making the watch. After mounting the planetary gearing, they wrapped a delicate chain around the mainspring barrel—to incorporate the components into the basic movement—and attached it to the fusée, a cone-shaped pulley. The mainspring’s basic tension was adjusted using the ratchet wheel on the barrel arbor that works as an axle.
The barrel of a watch is usually an enclosed cylindrical (in this case, square) metal box lined with gear teeth, containing a spiral mainspring, which generates the power to run the watch. The cage of the “Pour le Mérite” and the chronograph bridge are connected by its tourbillon bridge. For the uninitiated, the tourbillon is a mechanism in a watch to counter the effects of gravity when the wrist is moved around. A chronograph is a watch with a stopwatch; all watches are not chronographs while all chronographs are watches. All 164 parts of the movement of the “Pour le Mérite” are meticulously assembled and tweaked by hand to obtain accuracy within a fraction of a second—just one day’s correction is needed in 122 years! The moon phase is a miracle of thoughtful engineering: all non-blue colour
spectra are hidden by effects that function like a filter.
The dial of the Richard Lange Jumping Seconds has three intersecting circles resembling that of a pocket watch by Johann Seyffert in 1807. Near the vertical middle is a power reserve indicator, with a reset-to-zero setting mechanism for the seconds hand, which when pressed causes the hand to return to zero immediately.
The power reserve indication, set in a small triangle on the dial, segues gradually from white to red as the mainspring winds down. Jumping seconds is an indulgence of precision, with the hand rotating once every second, pausing up to eight times to indicate minute parts of a second. The Richard Lange Jumping Seconds watch has arrived over a century after the entry of the 42500 Grande Complication (1902)—the second classic Lange pocket watch—which exults in mechanical complexity with 833 components. The accuracy of this pocket watch with its intricately carved rose-gold case fitted with a seven-part enamel dial was remarkable for a computer-less early 20th century. Pardon the diversion, but the 42500 Grande Complication is one of the cornerstones of Germany’s watch-making history and currently occupies pride of place in a Dresden museum.
Like everything in Germany, life is divided into pre-World War II and post-war. The war-affected Dresden, too. Before producing wristwatches for German airmen in World War II, A. Lange & Söhne made pocket watches. It was in 1841 that Dresden watchmaker Johann C. F. Gutkaes and his journeyman Ferdinand Adolph Lange had completed work on the Five-Minute Clock above the great stage of the Dresden Semper Opera, which still keeps time perfectly. On December 7, 1845, Ferdinand Adolph established the first production pocket watch-making workshop in Glashütte staffed by 15 apprentices.
After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, Walter Lange revived the company, which had been taken over and ‘co-operativised’ by the faceless Soviet machine, with the classic celebratory “Lange 1” model in 1994. Along it were issued three other timepieces—the SAXONIA, the TOURBILLON “Pour le Mérite” and the ARKADE. Lange 1’s design is known as the “face” of the company—an asymmetric dial proudly showing off the prominent outsize date derived from the Opera House clock. The big date display had posed a challenge for Lange engineers who had to ensure the calendar switched correctly when 31-day months ended. There is a button on the watch’s side to correct the date display at the end of February, April, June, September and November.
The company has now also issued a reworked Grand Lange 1 and a luminous Lange 1 Time Zone in white gold. The watch cases are typically made of yellow gold, rose gold, white gold and platinum. All the movements are manufactured in-house with German silver. Moreover every single A. Lange & Söhne timepiece is unique because the balance-cock of each watch created in the Glashütte workhouse is hand-engraved. The engraving can be customised to make it special.
Three years after Lange 1, the company launched its first self-winding watch, the Langematik. In 1999, Lange’s first chronograph movement made in-house, the Caliber L951.1, was shown at the Basel Fair after four years in the making. Then came the Lange 31 with a power reserve of 31 days! In 2009, Lange made a daring design departure with its “new face”, the Zeitwerk. The big-numeral date design that started with the Lange 1 was now divided into hour and minutes displays on the left and right of the dial, respectively. It was obvious Lange was open to adopting a daring new design philosophy with tradition as its foundation.
Discreet elegance is the everlasting theme—the Terraluna’s complexity in the form of an impressive astronomical display can be viewed only through the glass casing on the back of the watch. This dedication to detail is evident in the Richard Lange Perpetual Calendar Terreluna launched in 2014 with its non-conventional moon-phase display showing a map of the Northern Hemisphere. All Lange watches are unabashedly German, using mechanical movements over quartz with a few special edition exceptions.
The site of the A. Lange & Söhne factory in Glashütte is where once imperial messengers would stop to relay messages or switch horses. At the opening ceremony of the company’s new manufactory building on August 26, 2015, German Chancellor Dr Angela Merkel told Walter Lange, “Eastern Germany’s good reputation as innovative, flexible and modern location is based on success stories like yours.”
Inside the factory, craftsmen work in concentrated silence. At various locations around, the company slogan ‘Never Stand Still’ is visible, taken from a quote from Walter Lange, “There’s something one should expect not only of a watch but also of oneself: To never stand still.” From the elegant timepieces to the complex imagination of Lange’s master craftsmen and women, the hands of perfection and precision are always on the move to seize time in all its celestial essence.