One Rattrapante To Rule Them All: The A. Lange & Söhne Triple Split (424.038F)
The rattrapante chronograph assumes its ultimate form.
There are three complications – call them the Big Three – which are considered more or less to be the ultimate expression of complicated watchmaking and for two out of the three it is intuitively obvious why this is so.
The first of the Big Three is the perpetual calendar. What it does is trivial – it’s a calendar which automatically shows the correct date at the end of every month, including months with less than 31 days including February, and even in a leap year.
Practically speaking this saves the owner from having to spend perhaps 45 seconds handling the crown five times per year (there are four months with 31 days and then there is February) so for tens or hundreds of times the cost of a watch with a simple calendar, you get to save 225 seconds per year. This is what people mean when they say time is valuable, I guess. How it does what it does is more interesting and the ingenuity needed to make a perpetual calendar complication, plus the extra craft (often, a lot of it) usually expended on finishing, makes the perpetual calendar one of the Big Three complications.
The second complication of the Big Three is the minute repeater. Here what it does makes obvious the complexity of how it does it. Even if you know nothing about repeater mechanisms in particular or watchmaking in general, the fact that pushing a slide sets in motion an audible chain of events, complete with enticing whirring sounds and the actual chiming of the time, immediately clues you into the fact that you are handling a watch which is definitely not business as usual.
The third complication of the Big Three is the rattrapante chronograph. There are numerous obstacles to a wider appreciation of the reasons why it has a place on the podium with the perpetual calendar and the repeater. The first is that what it does is a little obscure. The other two require a little bit of explaining but, “knows how long each month is automatically,” and “chimes the time on demand to the minute” are all a little more intuitive than, “allows you to time two successive intervals of elapsed time by having two superimposed chronograph seconds hands, one of which can be stopped independent of the second, which can then be stopped in its turn so that a difference of up to sixty seconds can be read off.” Even that requires further explanation and it is in no way clear from even that brief and incomplete definition, that doing that in a mechanical watch takes a lot of extra parts and lots of extra fiddling.
Nonetheless, however, the rattrapante chronograph is fully deserving of its seat at the high table. The only deficiency to the complication is that it is of somewhat limited scope, as the maximum difference between the first and second elapsed time intervals which can be measured, is one minute. If you are timing a close race in which say, Blue Note comes in 27 seconds after Danny Boy, it’s fine, but if you’re timing, for the sake of argument, the Rolex 24 at Daytona and you would like to know the difference between when two teams separated by an hour and a half cross the line, you’re SOL, so to speak.
Submitted for your consideration, then, should your timing needs require it, are two watches from A. Lange & Söhne. These are the rightly famous Double Split and Triple Split and it is specifically with the Triple Split that we are concerned today.
The Double Split is a split seconds/rattrapante chronograph which can show not only split seconds, but also split minutes. It is hard to believe now but the Double Split was introduced in 2004. This was the first mechanical watch to offer both split seconds and split minutes – rather surprisingly, since you can hardly think of a split seconds complication without wondering about making a split minutes and seconds complication.
Still, Lange was the first to do it and according to Lange’s Tony de Haas, they spent the next decade or so wondering if someone was going to try and one-up them by producing a split seconds, minutes, and hours chronograph. Tony de Haas would tell Logan Baker, in 2021, “We really expected someone else in the industry to come up with an idea, to top our idea, but it never came. We finalized the Grand Complication and thought ‘Ah, why don’t we have a chronograph with an hour counter?’ So we started working on it. In 14 years, no one in the market reacted by creating something like the triple split. We were very surprised that no one had the idea.”
In 2018, Lange released the Triple Split, to the wonder of us all. The fact that the Triple Split has never been so much as attempted by any other brand is indicative of its complexity and of the challenges involved in making one. It is, as they say, just what it says on the can – a chronograph capable of measuring two successive intervals with a time difference of up to twelve hours, with split seconds, minutes, and hours.
They layout of the dial side is straightforward and for a watch of its complexity the Triple Split (424.038F) is very easy to read and moreover, very easy to use. There are two superimposed chronograph elapsed seconds hands on the same axis as the hour and minute hands. On the right, and as is typical of Lange chronographs slightly below the horizontal centerline of the dial, there is the 30 minutes register, again with two superimposed chronograph elapsed minutes hands; the running seconds is on the left and there is an AB/AUF power reserve indicator at 6:00 (moved from its position at 12:00 in the Double Split).
Finally, at 12:00, there is the 12 hour register, with two superimposed elapsed hours hands.
Operation is also straightforward. The chronograph start and stop button is at 2:00 and the flyback/reset-to-zero button is at 4:00. If the chronograph is running, pressing the pusher at 4:00 will reset all the chronograph hands to zero and releasing it will allow them to start running from zero again. If the chronograph is running and you push the split button at 10:00, however, all three of the chronograph hands – seconds, minutes and hours – will stop but their superimposed split seconds, minutes, and hour hands will continue to run.
You push the split button when the first car (or horse, or what have you) crosses the finish line and you have recorded its time; when the second car (or horse, or what have you) crosses the line, you push the stop button and you have recorded the second time.
Behind all this is one of the most intricate chronograph mechanisms ever devised.
A conventional rattrapante chronograph relies on two column wheels. One of them controls the start, stop, and reset functions of the chronograph; the second controls the split seconds hand. The split seconds and chronograph seconds hands run together until you push the split button at which point, two clamps close on the rattrapante wheel, stopping the split hand while the chronograph seconds hand continues to run. The two hands must be very thin to minimize intertia, but they must also be perfectly aligned so that until they split they look like a single hand. The real reason, of course, that they need to be perfectly aligned is so that the split time can be read accurately to the second.
To understand the complexity of the Triple Split, take a quick look at a conventional rattrapante mechanism.
This is from Donald de Carle’s “Complicated Watches And Their Repair.” When the split button is pushed, the column wheel rotates allowing the jaws of the two pincers D to drop onto the split seconds wheel E under the pressure of the two springs, F. This stops the wheel, thereby freezing the split hand in place. The heart piece G, which is on the axis of the still-running chronograph seconds hand, continues to turn and as it does the lever H, with its ruby roller I, rides up and down the edge of the heart piece. Push the split seconds button again and the column wheel turns, lifting the clamps off the wheel. With the pressure released, the ruby roller I presses against the heart piece under the pressure of the very fine spring J, and the split seconds wheel E to which it is attached, turns until the ruby roller comes to rest on the lowest point of the heart piece, at which point the split hand and chronograph seconds hand are aligned and running together again.
The pipe for the chronograph seconds hand runs inside the hollow pinion of the split hand and the two have to be perfectly aligned. The action of the roller has to be light so as not to produce too much drag when the chronograph hands are split, but firm enough to ensure a nice snappy realignment. The spring J especially has to be made and adjusted with great care and as you can see, getting the whole system to work properly and reliably means balancing spring pressure and the mobility of the ruby roller on the cam very carefully. This is a big part of the reason the rattrapante is one of the Big Three complications.
Now, imagine having to do this so that a split minute and split hour hand both come along for the ride, and you can start to understand why the Triple Split was the most interesting watch of 2018 and one of the most interesting chronographs of all time.
Of course, the Lange caliber L32.1 is, like the Datograph flyback and Double Split which came before it, a stellar example of the fascination inherent in complex mechanics, especially complex mechanics are combined with high level finishing which is itself a natural extension of basic good practices in watchmaking.
Despite the complexity of the mechanism – the Triple Split’s movement has 556 components to control the movement of the ten hands on the dial – the architecture of the movement is compellingly beautiful, thanks partly to the logic imposed by the constraints of the complication and the available space, but also by Lange’s ability, for which it is justly famous, to combine aesthetic flourishes with good engineering.
Thanks to its complexity, cost, and inherently low production numbers (you just so obviously can’t exactly crank these out) it is also a watch not often encountered in person. Despite the fact that 2018 is not all that long ago, I’ve never seen one in person and would be very pleasantly surprised to see one on anyone’s wrist at a collector’s gathering. I feel it is unlikely to be surpassed any time soon, since the only way to go further would be to have a split date (followed, hahaha, by a split date perpetual calendar, bien sûr).
Chronographs are not a place where you see a lot of innovation because a good chronograph is very hard to do – years ago I asked Carole Forestier-Kasapi, while she was running movement development at Cartier, whether a tourbillon or a chronograph was more difficult and she looked at me as if I had horns growing out of my head and said, “A chronograph is much more difficult. Any idiot can design a tourbillon,” so, there it is. In the last twenty years we’ve had just a handful of really groundbreaking chronographs – the MB&F Sequential EVO, the Agengraphe caliber, and the Audemars Piguet Concept Laptimer Michael Schumacher come to mind – for good reasons. The Triple Split is Lange at its peak of innovation and a crowning triumph on the journey that began with the Datograph in 1999 – despite Lange’s image as a brand defined by tradition, it’s a bold example of this classically oriented Saxon watchmaker planting a flag in an undiscovered country.