Introduced on the anniversary of A. Lange & Söhne’s founding, the new watch features a rich brown dial and will be produced in a limited edition of 250 pieces.
December 7 is a historic date for A. Lange & Söhne: it’s both the date of the company’s founding in 1845 and of its rebirth in 1990. It makes sense, then, that the brand has chosen December 7 to introduce its latest timepiece.
In 1845, Ferdinand Adolph Lange founded his watchmaking company after a stint as an apprentice to master watchmaker Johann Friedrich Gutkaes in Dresden, Germany. “In those times, it wasn’t easy to become an apprenticeship trainee,” A. Lange & Söhne’s CEO, Wilhelm Schmid, said in an interview. However, “Mr. Gutkaes identified the huge talent of Mr. Ferdinand Adolph Lange, and together with his son, he took the two on to train them as watchmakers.” After Lange took an extended trip to Switzerland and Paris, Gutkaes offered to make him a part of his company, but Lange declined. “Ferdinand was very eager to do his own business,” Schmid said.
With the help of a government loan, Lange started a watchmaking school in Glashütte. “It was lucky for Glashütte that he chose Glashütte,” Schmid said, indicating that there were other cities that could have been chosen.
A Tale of Two Cities
Lange’s loan was part of a government program to help remote areas of the country gain prosperity. “Glashütte was just one city on the list that he could have chosen from and he chose Glashütte. He then started as a school with 15 apprentice trainees,” and that was “the humble beginnings of what later on became A. Lange & Söhne.” At first, the company was called A. Lange, until Mr. Lange’s sons joined him at the helm of the manufacture. In the early years, A. Lange’s watches featured the city names of both Glashütte and Dresden on their dials.
“It’s very interesting to see early pocket watches where it says A. Lange, and then Glashütte next to Dresden. Because Dresden was very well-known, and Glashütte was not at all.” That shifted over time, but “it was quite a ways from the beginning,” Schmid said. “You can see on the development of the logo, the gaining importance of Glashütte, to the extent that at the end was A. Lange & Söhne Glashütte in Saxony, but it was quite some years away from the beginning until that assignment.”
Unfortunately, A. Lange & Söhne was nationalized at the end of World War II, bringing about an abrupt halt to the business. But the brand was brought back to life decades later. In 1990, a year after the Berlin Wall fell, Ferdinand Adolph Lange’s great-grandson Walter Lange officially registered the company on December 7, the same date that his great-grandfather founded his company 145 years before.
“I think the two, Mr. Günter Blümlein [Walter Lange’s business partner], and Mr. Lange were very good at thinking long-term,” said Schmid. “And using the same date, just a different year, was a very clever move.” But registering on December 7 proved to be an unexpected challenge.
Signed and Sealed
“Walter Lange didn’t understand that Glashütte in those days belonged to Dippoldiswalde [a neighboring town and the region’s administrative center]. So, he actually knocked first on the wrong door, and they told him you cannot register the company here, you have to go there [Dippoldiswalde]. When he arrived in Dippoldiswalde, the office was closed and it was a Friday.” But Mr. Lange was not to be deterred. “He managed his way, knocking on the doors and on the back doors until he was finally let in. He really made an effort to assure that somebody signed and registered the company on that date. That’s how important it was for the two of them,” he continued.
Pure Magic
And December 7 has remained just as important to this day, a testament to Walter Lange’s long-term thinking. The new Lange 1 Daymatic is crafted in Lange’s proprietary honeygold and features the brand’s in-house caliber L021.1 self-winding movement. The L021.1 has a central rotor in 21k gold with a centrifugal mass crafted of 950 platinum. As with all Lange 1 timepieces, it features the Lange outsize date on its dial, which is configured as a mirror image of the manually wound Lange 1.
Unlike the classic Lange 1, however, the Daymatic has a retrograde day-of-week display instead of a power-reserve indicator. Like all A. Lange & Söhne watches, the Lange 1 Daymatic’s movement is assembled at least twice to ensure that it meets the brand’s exacting quality standards. The watch has a 50-hour power reserve when fully wound, and is equipped with a taupe hand-stitched alligator strap.
“There should never be a year where we do not introduce anything new in the Lange 1 family,” Schmid said. And he ensured that Lange did just that.