Three years ago, A. Lange & Söhne celebrated the founder Ferdinand Adolph Lange's 200th birthday. The horologist and mayor transformed Glashütte, a Saxon mining town, into Germany's watchmaking hub.
His birth year is memorialised in the 1815 watch series featuring hallmarks of 19th and 20th century pocket watches such as blued hands, Arabic numerals and a railway-track minute scale.
The vintage look is combined with technical ingenuity in a series that ranges from an annual calendar and chronograph to tourbillon and rattrapante perpetual calendars, not to mention intriguing grand complications.
What's next for the quintessential timepiece? The 2018 novelties include The 1815 Homage to Walter Lange, chronographs in pink gold, and a tourbillon with a white enamel dial.
1815 Homage to Walter Lange collection.
Revisiting its archives, the German brand came upon a complication that exactly measures the smallest unit of time, invented by the founder in 1867, further developed by his son, and patented in 1877.
The jumping sweep seconds hand is installed in a limited-edition that pays tribute to fourth-generation Walter Lange, who revived the company in the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification.
The 1815 Homage to Walter Lange with the jumping seconds was created as what he would have deemed the perfect watch.
The model is equipped with an oscillation system, whose frequency of 21,600 semi-oscillations per hour is mapped by the small seconds hand in a subsidiary dial at 6 o'clock.
From marker to marker, the small seconds hand makes six small steps whereas the blued sweep seconds hand performs precise jumps from second to second. A pusher at 2 o'clock starts and stops this mechanism, which can be used for heart rate measurements.
The watch's newly-developed L1924 movement refers to the year that Walter Lange was born whereas the reference number 297 is his date of birth on July 29. At the age of 92, he passed away in January 2017.
With a case diameter of 40.5mm, the 1815 Homage to Walter Lange comes in white, pink and yellow gold versions as well as a unique piece in steel with a black enamel dial that has been auctioned off, fetching 852,500 Swiss Francs to raise funds for Swiss charity Children Action.
1815 Homage to Walter Lange, unique piece in steel with a black enamel dial.
The historic stoppable jumping seconds is regarded a precursor of the modern chronograph.
Accurate to one-fifth of a second, the 1815 Chronograph has been reinterpreted in a 39.5mm pink gold case with a black or argente-coloured dial.
The stopwatch features a flyback function and a peripheral pulsometer scale graduated from 40 to 200 beats, with the chronograph sweep seconds hand indicating heart rate in beats per minute.
Like the jumping seconds, the pulsometer scale was a classic pocket watch function.
Drawing further inspiration from pocket watches, A. Lange & Söhne reddened the number 12 on the new platinum 1815 Tourbillon boasting an enamel dial, available in 100 pieces.
The number 12 has to be separately imprinted and fired, resulting in a lively touch of red on the face of the 39.5mm watch.
The painstaking enamelling process takes several days, during which various steps have to be repeated over and over again while ensuring absolute cleanliness since the smallest particle of dust or dirt would mar the surface.
Besides traditional craftsmanship, the dial showcases modern micromechanics at 6 o'clock, where a large aperture reveals the one-minute tourbillon suspended beneath a black polished bridge.
Not only does the tourbillon offset the effect of gravity, it is complemented by patented zero-set and stop-seconds mechanisms, whose interaction allows the watch to be stopped and then set with one-second accuracy.
All in all, the new 1815 mechanical models continue the horological legacy of the Lange family in producing precise timekeeping instruments while taking German watchmaking in Glashütte to the next level.
