The Homage To Walter Lange 1815 (297.032) Commemorates A Giant Of Modern Watchmaking
And has an archaic and fascinating complication dear to his heart.
When Walter Lange passed away in 2017 at the age of 92, it was both the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one. Walter Lange had been present for the catastrophic collapse of the watchmaking industry in Glashütte at the end of World War II, as well as the nationalization of the Glashütte watchmakers, and after the reunification of Germany in 1990, he set out to restore A. Lange & Söhne in partnership with the equally legendary entrepreneur, Günter Blümlein, who was one of the major architects of the modern watchmaking world. Lange’s first collection of watches, released in 1994, set the tone for all of its subsequent watchmaking and the company’s combination of almost willfully archaic watchmaking design cues and techniques (3/4 plates, screwed-down jewel chatons, the use of untreated German silver, or maillechort) with striking designs that established a whole new design vocabulary, still define the company’s watchmaking today.
Unlike many brands which have devoted themselves wholeheartedly to growth in production (Blümlein’s other two projects, IWC and Jaeger-LeCoultre, went from niche brands that had barely survived the Quartz Crisis, to international luxury powerhouses) Lange has remained relatively small-scale in production, making just a few thousand watches per year – although the company’s perceived prestige is out of all proportion to its production numbers (or, possibly, at least partly thanks to its low production numbers).
Walter Lange’s legacy was never in doubt after the company’s spectacular rebirth, and after he passed away, Lange created (in a quite short period of time) an homage to Walter Lange – the Homage To Walter Lange 1815, in fact. This is at first glance one of the most perplexing watches that Lange has ever created, and one of the most unusual watches in our entire collection, because while it is a complicated watch, the complication it implements is one which most students of the history of complications would have written off as obsolete.
That complication is an independent center seconds hand, advancing once per second, which can be stopped and restarted via a pusher in the case. (Another way of describing it would be an independent center deadbeat seconds hand). Watches with one second jumping seconds hands are well known in modern watchmaking – examples include everything from the Journe Tourbillon Souverain to the Grönefeld One Hertz, to the Rolex Tru-Beat –and there are a number of different ways to implement the deadbeat seconds complication.
However, a center deadbeat seconds hand which can be stopped and restarted is much more unusual. The complication preceded the chronograph proper – the Breguet No. 160 “Marie Antoinette” had such a seconds hand –and rather understandably, it fell by the wayside when the first modern chronographs with start/stop/return to zero functionality began to appear in the mid-19th century. The closest anyone’s ever come to such a complication in modern wristwatches, at least that I’m aware of, is the Omega Chronostop, which had a center seconds hand that could be started and then stopped by holding down the single pusher, which, when released, would allow the seconds hand to fly back to the zero position.
The Homage To Walter Lange 1815’s independent center seconds was based on a design from Lange’s archives – a patent granted to Walter Lange’s great grandfather, Richard Lange, the son of founder Ferdinand Adolph Lange. The patent was granted in 1877. Walter Lange wanted very much to have a wristwatch version of this mechanism made and before his death, he tried on several occasions to talk the company into producing it, but his hope was destined to be disappointed – in an interview in 2018, Lange’s Tino Bobe and Anthony de Haas discussed the reasons for the company’s reluctance to produce the design as it seemed to them a technical step backwards. As a follow-up to watches like the Datograph, Double Split, and Triple Split it certainly seems like an anachronism, but the mechanism is a beautiful one, and beautifully made.
The independent center seconds hand can be started and stopped with a pusher in the case, which controls the independent jumping seconds complication via a column wheel system identical to that found in a chronograph. The independent jumping seconds hand is triggered by a star shaped wheel with five points, which is on the axis of the escape wheel and turns with it. As it turns, it periodically releases a pivoting lever, known as a “flirt” in watchmaking parlance, which snaps around almost instantly a full 360 degrees, and acts as the release for the independent center seconds hand, the train for which is kept under tension by a separate ratchet wheel geared to the mainspring barrel. The whole mechanism has to be constructed with great precision and all the moving parts, particularly the rapidly moving flirt, have to be as light as possible, since the triggering mechanism is on the escape wheel and any additional load at that point could significantly take away from the torque needed for the lever and balance.
The movement is caliber L1924, named after the year of Walter Lange’s birth. The column wheel and stop/start lever are on the left, and the star wheel and flirt are under the independent seconds bridge at 6:00, adjacent to the balance. Center right, the ratchet wheel which transfers energy to the independent seconds train. When the independent seconds train is stopped, the pallets of the transfer clicks idle against the teeth of the ratchet wheel, which continues to turn. This is necessary because stopping the ratchet wheel would block the mainspring barrel from turning, and stop the entire movement.
The Homage To Walter Lange 1815 was released as a limited edition in white, pink, and yellow gold and it is no longer part of Lange’s current collections. There was also a unique piece in stainless steel, auctioned by Phillips in 2018 to benefit Children Action, which sold for $852,525 – a record at the time for the most expensive Lange ever sold at auction.
It took me quite a long time to understand this watch, and I think to do so requires considering the context in which it was created, and what Lange’s philosophy towards watchmaking really is, at least as it was understood when the company created its first collections, and as Walter Lange understood it. Lange is a technical powerhouse but I think that for obvious reasons, to Walter Lange it represented his family’s heritage as well, and was to some extent a living museum of that heritage. The independent jumping seconds is, it’s true, archaic and has long since been technically superseded by the modern chronograph, but at the same time, much of Lange’s watchmaking is about the preservation and actual celebration of traditional Glashütte watchmaking.
It is in this light, I think, that the Homage to Walter Lange 1815 is best understood. This is a watch which, far from being an inexplicable outlier in Lange’s modern production, is in many respects one of the most essential expressions of watchmaking at Lange that the company has ever made. It is a tangible connection to both the founding family and one of the co-founders of the modern company, and in its obsessively perfectionistic execution of something a casual observer might write off as technically outmoded, I think it stands as a symbol of the real value to be found in high end mechanical horology today.