The A. Lange & Söhne
Zeitwerk Minute Repeater
All the bells and whistles.
The Lange Zeitwerk Minute repeater is not the most complicated watch that A. Lange & Söhne has ever made — that honor goes to Lange’s Grand Complication, which was released in 2013 and was based on a Grand Complication pocket watch which the company completed in 1902.
But the Zeitwerk Minute Repeater is pretty close, though. It features the jumping digital display seen on the original Zeitwerk, launched in 2009, which uses three disks to show the time, on a single line across the horizontal axis of the watch. The Zeitwerk (the name means, literally, “time work” in German) was based on an idea originally conceived by Günter Blümlein, who with Walter Lange, relaunched the company in the aftermath of the Quartz Crisis. The first collection from the new company was released in 1994 and included the Lange 1 but the Zeitwerk, despite being something of a latecomer, has become almost as much an icon for Lange as its revered predecessor.
Blümlein passed away untimely, in 2001, at the age of 58, but shortly before his death, he created some preliminary design sketches for what would eventually become the Zeitwerk. Lange’s Anthony de Haas, who joined the company in 2004, began working on developing the idea that same year.
Watches with jumping time displays pose some major technical challenges to a watchmaker. The basic problem is that the disks are much heavier than conventional watch hands and so driving the disks takes away from the energy available for the watch overall. This can have a negative effect on precision — the load is especially high when all three disks have to jump simultaneously, at the top of each hour.
To cope with this, de Haas and his team settled on a mechanism Lange had used before in the Lange 31 — the constant force device known as a remontoir. A remontoir is basically a second mainspring, mounted on one of the gear train wheels, which is wound up at fixed intervals by the primary mainspring. It’s a very old and very sophisticated solution to the problem of maintaining an even level of torque in the gear train and therefore, an even level of energy going to the escapement and balance — the spring remontoire was originally invented by the English horologist, John Harrison, for use in his marine chronometers. (F. P. Journe used the same solution in his Vagabondage watches).
The Zeitwerk Minute Repeater upped the ante even further. Adding a minute repeater mechanism to the Zeitwerk means, unavoidably, an increase in size, and the basic Zeitwerk model in the current catalog (with a second generation movement that offered some big improvements over the original, including a power reserve upped to 72 hours from the 36 hours of the first generation) is already fairly large, at 41.9mm x 12.2mm. By modern watch standards overall this is not all that big, with some time and date dive watches coming in at comparable dimensions, but for Lange, which is a very traditionally oriented watch brand with very deep historical roots, making an arbitrarily large watch just to fit in more parts, without taking wearability into consideration, was not on the table and so de Haas and his team set out to figure out how to create a minute repeating Zeitwerk in a reasonably sized case.
It was obvious from the beginning that the diameter would have to be increased to accommodate the gongs. The Zeitwerk Minute repeater was not Lange’s first chiming rodeo; it had been preceded by the 2011 Zeitwerk Striking Time, which is an hour-striking watch, and which was in retrospect something of a warming-up exercise for the Zeitwerk Minute Repeater. The Striking Time has two hammers, identical to what would later be seen in the Minute Repeater, on the dial side of the watch, and they strike two gongs, also on the dial side. There is a single, low-pitched strike at the top of each hour, and a single, higher-pitched strike at each quarter hour. Adding the striking mechanism, hammers, and gongs made the Striking Time a 44.2mm x 13.6mm watch and for the Minute Repeater, any additional increase in size would have to be kept as small as possible.
Normally, a minute repeater’s striking train is powered by a smaller, secondary mainspring wound up by pushing a slide set into the case-band of the watch. To avoid the additional size this would entail, the Zeitwerk Minute Repeater uses the mainspring to power both the repeater, and the main gear train. This makes the remontoir even more important, since the power reserve drops every time the minute repeater is activated. The watch is set up so that if the power reserve drops below a certain point (marked on the power reserve indication by a small red dot) the repeater is blocked, and that’s the owner’s cue that the watch needs to be wound if they want to use the repeater. There is enough juice in the barrel for a total of 12 repetitions of the strike for 12:59, which is the longest chime for a repeater.
Another interesting feature of the Zeitwerk Minute Repeater is what you might call a “what you see is what you get” mechanism. Because the time is displayed by jumping digits, and because it takes time for all the gongs to chime (usually somewhere around 18 seconds in minute repeaters) it might be possible for the display to switch while the gongs are still chiming — meaning that the time shown no longer corresponds to the time being struck. The Zeitwerk therefore incorporates a mechanism to prevent the time from switching until after the strike is completed.
Oh, and there’s one more thing — the Zeitwerk Minute Repeater is one of the rare versions of the complication known as a decimal repeater. A conventional repeater chimes the hours, then the quarter hours (on two gongs) and then the minutes. A decimal repeater, on the other hand, chimes the hours, and then the number of ten minute intervals after the hour, and then, the number of minutes. 12:59 on a standard repeater would chime as twelve hour strikes, three quarter strikes, and then, fourteen minute strikes. On a decimal repeater, you would hear twelve hour strikes, five ten-minute strikes (50 minutes) and then nine minute strikes. (I will take a brief moment here to toot my own horn just a little — the person who invented the decimal repeater is Kari Voutilainen, but the person who came up with the name “decimal repeater” is yours truly, way back in 2005, when Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth. My sole substantive contribution to modern horology).
As with the Striking Time, hammers and gongs are both on the dial side of the watch, and the movement — Lange caliber L.043.5 — is as beautifully rich in detail, and as wonderfully elaborate in finish as you’d expect. There’s also quite a lot to see — the constant force mechanism is on view, underneath an extremely elaborate bridge with four ruby bearings set into it, as well as the centrifugal regulator which controls the speed at which the chimes are struck.
If you’re a Lange enthusiast, there’s a strong argument to be made that the Zeitwerk and its variations (there have been nearly 20 references introduced since 2009) really represents both the most essential identity of Lange, as well as its idiosyncratic approach to complicated watchmaking. The watch is deeply rooted in history — the idea originated with a digital clock design by Johann Christian Friedrich Gutkaes, under whom Lange’s founder, Ferdinand Adolph Lange, apprenticed, which was installed above the main stage of the Dresden Semper Opera House in the 1830s. (Ironically, one of the reasons for installing the clock was to keep people from interrupting the performance by checking the time on their chiming watches). It’s a phenomenally complex timepiece — 771 movement components, vs. 528 for the Striking Time, and 451 for the Zeitwerk.
But it wears its complexity lightly, and the intricacy of the watch, while it’s on view for you to marvel at if you want, in no way diminishes the simple delight given by seeing the repeater and the digital displays in action. It’s one of the most important watches in Lange’s entire history, and it’s a unique take on a very rare system for displaying the time, but it is also something which you wouldn’t necessarily think of, when you think of a supercomplicated watch made in Saxony by one of the most straight-faced, earnest brands in the business — it’s fun.