2019 brings with it a number of anniversaries that may spawn some celebration watches, such as 50 years from the moon landing, 50 years since the first automatic chronograph, 50 years since the Seiko Astron, the first quartz wristwatch, and 50 years since the first Concorde flight. A. Lange & Söhne celebrated its own special…
The Saxonia Thin has been part of the A. Lange & Söhne collection since 2011, and since then a number of different versions have been introduced. This year’s piece is a 39-millimetre watch, just 6.2 mm thick. Its size makes it accessible to both men and women, and the aventurine glass dial, deep blue strewn…
Right at the top of the great Ancient Egyptian pyramids, at the top of millions of ton of stone, there was originally a pyramidion, a miniature version of the entire pyramid forming the very apex, a single piece of granite or limestone a metre or two high covered in gold leaf. And, in the most…
Which was the best watch at SIHH 2018? Looking at the photo below, it may seem surprising to see a watch like this amongst the top watches at the Salon Internationale de la Haute Horlogerie. It has a classical dial and it doesn’t do anything revolutionary. But, when I was looking at the 1815 “Homage…
It’s typical of A. Lange & Söhne that the view through the caseback is far more showy than what you see on the front. The slim case and narrow bezel highlight the wide open space of the mother-of-pearl dial, where everything is reduced to the minimum. Turn it over and you see the engraved balance…
The Little Lange 1 Moon Phase is a women’s watch with all the prestige of A. Lange & Söhne’s watchmaking sophistication. It mixes feminine grace with the fascination of a hand-wound movement. It follows the 2016 Lange 1 moon phase, which is 1.7 mm larger, and basically a men’s watch. Unlike that watch, the Little…
This complication watch, Tourbograph Perpetual Pour le Mérite, by A. Lange & Söhne has a fusée-and-chain constant force transmission, a tourbillon, a split-second chronograph, and a perpetual calendar. It completes the Pour le Mérite line of development: the Tourbillon Pour le Mérite was launched in 1994, the first wristwatch with both tourbillon and fusée-and-chain transmission, and…
A. Lange & Söhne make some of the most distinctive, rare and unusual watches in the world. The Zeitwerk Decimal Strike is a good example, a limited edition of 100 watches, with the jumping hours and minutes indications already seen on the Zeitwerk introduced in 2009, and on the Zeitwerk Minute Repeater presented in 2015.…
The 1815 Chronograph has been part of the A. Lange & Söhne collection since 2004, in a pulsometer arrangement until 2010 when a new version was release without the pulsometer scale. This year, 2017, a black-dial version has been released, once again with pulsometer dial. Case and dial The watch has a 39.5 white gold…
Watches today are becoming chunkier and more colourful, moving away from the appearance typical of a functional, scientific, practical timepiece. This is not the case for A. Lange & Söhne, whose watches retain their timeless, sober style, and, whatever their value, remain pieces that could be worn during everyday life without raising eyebrows. They are…
In 2007, when it was introduced, the Lange 31 was the world record holder for power reserve in a mechanical watch, reaching 31 days, 744 hours. Since then, other watches have exceeded this, but the Lange 31 is still the watch with a classic case design having the highest power reserve. It’s large, 46 mm…
I saw this watch on the morning of 17 January 2017, at the watch show SIHH in Geneva, at a presentation that began on a sad note because the A. Lange & Söhne representative began by announcing that their company founder, Walter Lange, had passed away earlier that morning at the age of 92. The…
Just writing about a watch by A. Lange & Söhne gives me gooseflesh. Their pieces have a combination of technical creativity, watchmaking artistry and aesthetic discretion that is second to none. From the front, you have no idea of the marvels inside, and even when you turn it over, there are just a few beguiling…
This year’s version of the Datograph Auf/Ab by A. Lange & Söhne, originally presented in platinum in 2012, has a pink gold case, 41 mm in diameter, 13.1 mm thick, and a black silver dial. The name Auf/Ab (Up/Down) refers to the power reserve indicator at the bottom of the dial, which points to Auf…
Company profile: Glashütte was originally a glassmaking centre (glaβ, glass, hütte, foundry), but the discovery of silver, and later iron ore in 1490, marked the start of mining . The years of prosperity under Augustus the Strong (1674-1733) who helped transform Dresden into a city of art, culture and industry, were brought to an end…
A. Lange & Söhne always have a giant model of the most important piece in their collection at the entrance to their stand at SIHH, and this time it was the Zeitwerk Minute Repeater. A beautiful piece in every way, with just one small but significant defect (and I don’t mean the price). But we’ll…
All watches are interesting as tiny marvels of engineering, but a few brands have something extra in their DNA that turns their company history into a story worthy of a Hollywood film. A. Lange & Söhne is one of those brands. Founded in 1845 in Glashütte, near Dresden in Germany, over the course of a…
It’s something that’s been seen before in fashion, the idea of coordinated garments for him and her that reinforce the “couple” idea. Shanghai Tang, for example, in the image below, have done it with subtlety, so that they are not exactly matching, but complementary. A.Lange & Söhne are doing it in watches. The Lange 1…
Grand Lange 1 Moon Phase, reference 139.025 August the Strong, Elector of Saxony, founded Europe’s first collection of scientific instruments, the “art chamber” in Dresden, in 1728, and it is now the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon in the Zwinger building, Dresden. For many years, it was a research institution, and the local time for Dresden was set…
A. Lange & Söhne create brilliant, complex watches, but they don’t shout about it. One of the two great German watch brands (with Glashütte Original) based in Glashütte, near Dresden, A. Lange & Söhne delights its fans and collectors with watches whose complexity of functions is accompanied by wonderful movements and understated dial design. In…