The A. Lange & Söhne Lange 1 Perpetual Calendar Tourbillon Automatic
A pioneering modern classic of complicated watchmaking.
The perpetual calendar was first placed into a wristwatch, as far as we know, by the great English watchmaker Thomas Mudge, in about 1762, and only two are known; one was purchased at auction by Patek Philippe, in 2016 and the other is in the British Museum. The tourbillon was patented by Breguet, in 1801 and while the perpetual calendar would go on to become a staple feature of high end watchmaking, the tourbillon would remain rare in both pocket watches and wristwatches until the growing market for complicated watches in the 1990s made them increasingly common in high end watchmaking as well.

Putting the tourbillon and perpetual calendar together in the same watch began, in wristwatches, in the early 1990s, with Blancpain’s 1735, IWC’s Il Destriero Scafusia, and the unique piece Superbia Humanitas (which was based on a Louis Elysée Piguet caliber from 1892, which had additional complications added to it by Franck Muller in 1992, and then had a tourbillon added by AHCI member Paul Gerber; that watch was shown at BaselWorld in 1995). Lange got into the tourbillon game early – when the company was relaunched in 1994, one of the four watches it introduced was the Tourbillon Pour Le Mérite, and Lange’s first perpetual calendar came seven years later – the Langematik Perpetual Calendar, from 2001. Several years earlier, Lange had launched its first automatic movement, the caliber L921, in the Langematik. The Langematik movement and watch were introduced in 1997 and featured a seconds hand that would reset to zero for more precise time-setting when the crown was pulled out – this was done in the same way you’d zero a chronograph seconds hand, with a heart cam and hammer. The first Lange watch to combine the perpetual calendar and tourbillon added them to the 1994 Lange 1 design, and the Lange 1 Perpetual Calendar Tourbillon launched in 2012. The first watches were in platinum, with an argenté (silver) dial and were produced in a limited series of 100 pieces.
Adding complications to the Lange 1 is a major challenge thanks to the architecture of the movement. The Lange 1 was designed from the ground up to support a very particular dial design, with the large date display dominating the dial, and a subdial for the hours and minutes, and another for the small seconds; the rest of the remaining real estate was taken up by the power reserve indicator.
Redesigning a modern classic
You wouldn’t think that there was a tremendous amount of room left over for adding indications for the day of the week, month, and leap year as well as the moonphase which is more or less expected in a perpetual calendar and you’d be right, which is why it took quite a while for Lange to figure out how to integrate an automatic perpetual calendar movement with tourbillon into the Lange 1 design. Eventually, they’d end up redesigning and re-engineering the basic perpetual calendar complication more or less from scratch.
We talked in depth about how the movement was developed and what steps were necessary to integrate a perpetual calendar complication and tourbillon into the Lange 1 design in our recent review of the latest platinum version of the Lange 1 Perpetual, but perhaps a brief recap’s in order. The symmetry of the dial was reversed, first of all – the Lange 1 Perpetual Tourbillon is basically a mirror image of the Lange 1, and the space taken up by the power reserve in the Lange I was repurposed for the day of the week indication. The moonphase was added to the small seconds display (which Lange first added to the Lange 1 fairly early in its history, back in 2002) and the power reserve indication was moved to a small subdial (very small … you could call it a sub-subdial, I suppose) inside the subdial for the hours and minutes.
The neatest part of the watch, though, was the inventive solution to showing the month. Rather than adding yet another subdial (which would have destroyed the composition of the original design) or showing the month in a window on the dial (for which there is scarcely any room anyway) Lange opted to show the date in a rotating ring on the periphery of the dial, just inside the bezel. The ring rotates anticlockwise once per year, and a small pointer with a very discreet window acts as both the date indicator, and the indicator for the Leap Year.
The month ring’s inner edge is hidden under the dial, but it’s the key to how the whole perpetual calendar system works – it has a series of hills and valleys, the depth or height of which corresponds to the length of each month. This takes the place of a conventional program wheel in a traditional perpetual calendar, and, critically, it allowed Lange’s Anthony de Haas and his team to rearrange the switching mechanisms for all the calendar indications so that they could fit into the small amount of room left available under the dial.
In a world where tourbillon owners generally expect to be able to see the tourbillon through an opening in the dial, Lange has opted for a much more traditional approach – the tourbillon is only visible through the caseback, which I don’t see as a drawback so much as it is a manifestation of the traditional approach to implementing a tourbillon in a wristwatch, or a pocket watch, for that matter. (Breguet didn’t do display backs). It is true that Lange has been happy to show the tourbillon through a dial aperture in some instances, going all the way back to 1994 but there is something rather au courant about the stealth luxury approach Lange’s taken here.
The movement, Lange caliber L082.1, is an example of Lange at its very best. Movement decoration is lavish as you might expect, and the tourbillon is as beautiful as any ever made. L082.1 is a self-winding tourbillon with perpetual calendar, with an automatic winding rotor in 21K gold which has attached to it a platinum peripheral weight (this helps increase the efficiency of the rotor, which is slightly smaller than the full diameter of the movement).
The movement, in addition to the tourbillon, automatic winding system, and perpetual calendar, is also an instantaneous jumping perpetual – that is, all of the calendar indications switch simultaneously and instantaneously at midnight. This is achieved through the use of a double cam system which stores up energy for the jumps throughout the course of a day – a system that adds considerable complexity and requires very precise manufacturing and adjustment.
The tourbillon rotates once per minute and is located more or less exactly at 6:00, so one of the wheels flanking it is to drive the carriage and the other is for driving the small seconds display, which is offset, at about 7:30 on the dial, from the vertical axis. The tourbillon features a freesprung, adjustable mass balance and also, Lange’s unique stop seconds method for stopping the tourbillon and therefore the small seconds hand; you can see the Y-shaped yoke used to block the balance to the upper right of the tourbillon. The stop seconds mechanism is designed so that even if one arm of the Y is blocked by one of the tourbillon cage pillars, the yoke will pivot and the other arm will be able to fall onto the balance, stopping it.
Despite the complexity of the movement and its several layers (the automatic winding system, base movement, tourbillon, perpetual calendar works, and big date mechanism) the watch is quite wearable, at 41.9mm x 12.2mm.
This is certainly one of the most ingenious examples of modern complicated watchmaking and it represents something you might not ordinarily think of when you think of Lange. The stereotype of A. Lange & Söhne is of a rather pragmatic, solid, even stolid company with one foot, and most of the other foot, squarely planted in tradition. I think the reality is a little more subtle – the Lange 1 is now a respected elder of the modern watchmaking landscape but it is still a watch driven by a very particular vision of watch design. The mechanical sophistication of the Lange 1 Perpetual Tourbillon Automatic is considerable but it is there (and this is an easy thing to forget) to support a very specific design language, not to just be complicated – even ingeniously so – for its own sake. Lange has made, in the almost thirty years since it was reborn, any number of beautiful watches both simple and complex, but I think the Lange 1 Tourbillon Perpetual Automatic stands out even in the rarefied company of complicated watches from Lange – a kind of summary of the state of the art, and the history of certain complications at Lange, as things stood in 2012, and still an endlessly intellectually entertaining and beautiful piece today.