Lange & Soehne turns 200 years!

The luxury german watchmaker has just turned 200 years. The company has been founded in 1845 by Ferdinand Adolph Lange in Glashuette, which is a small town near Dresden, Saxony, east Germany. After his death his two sons, Emil and Richard, kept producing high-end pocket watches, as in the old years it was more custom to use pocket watches. They then continued to produce very large watches for the armee.

But after the second world war, the company ceased their existence, as east Germany has been occupied by the Russians. After the reunification of the east and west, Walter Lange, who is the great-grandson of the founder, decided to restore the company and start all over again. They are now members of the Richemont Group, and their luxury watches sell in the most high-end jewelry stores worldwide. Most of their watch cases are made of yellow or white gold, all the pieces are being designed and assembled in their workshop in Glashuette. The design of their watches is not only about simplicity and timeless elegance, it is also about a lot of technical complications. Some of their watches are designed to go for the next 100 years without having to change the calender! For more information please go to http://www.alange-soehne.com/

Collections[edit]

All Lange watches contain mechanical rather than quartz movements and, with the exception of a very few special edition watches, Lange watch cases are made of yellow gold, rose gold, white gold, or platinum. Lange movements are developed, produced, and assembled by Lange itself. Lange’s movement design and decoration is distinctively Glashütte in appearance, eschewing typically Swiss features, such as multiple bridges and cocks, or pearlage, in favor of three-quarter plates, “Glashütte stripes”, hand-engraved balance cocks and screwed gold chatons. Lange movements are made from a metal known as “German silver”, an alloy of copper and nickel, as opposed to the plated brass typically used for Swiss movements, giving Lange movements an unusual color and sheen.

Lange watches tend to have a distinctive appearance. For example, the “Lange 1” model features an asymmetric layout with no overlap among its key indicators: a dial displaying the hours and minutes, a smaller subsidiary dial displaying seconds, an oversized double window date display, and a power reserve indicator.[3] Lange’s watches are often described as more “austere” or “Teutonic” in appearance than watches produced by comparable Swiss firms.

In addition to time-only watches, both manually wound and automatic, Lange is known for its complicated watches, including chronographs and split-seconds chronographs, and perpetual calendars.

At the SIHH 2012 show A.Lange & Sohne unveiled new watches including a take on the classic Lange 1. The Lange 1 watch family is to be headed by the Lange 1 Tourbillon Perpetual Calendar, with two large complications and a new type of instantaneously jumping month ring.