Two of A. Lange & Söhne’s most impressive time-only watches welcome notably updates today in the 1815 and Richard Lange families. When it comes to Lange, there’s always more than meets the eye, and while they may not be entirely new, they do bring distinct material pairings to their respective collections. The new watches are the 1815 Tourbillon sporting a black dial and platinum case, and the Richard Lange Jumping Seconds with a pink gold dial and a white gold case. Both build on a unique mechanical identity that pushes the simple act of tracking the hours and minutes into the extraordinary.
Beginning with the 1815 Tourbillon, we’re met with a classic Lange configuration that places a black dial (made of enamelled white gold) within a platinum case. This represents a distinct shift in personality from the existing white dial variations, as experienced elsewhere in the A. Lange & Söhne catalogue. It feels trim and almost sporty in this guise, while maintaining an old school chronometer style that works in an exposed tourbillon at six o’clock. The tourbillon itself uses a beautifully designed and finished cage, which makes a full rotation each 60 seconds against a railroad style chapter ring that’s echoed at the minute track at the perimeter of the dial.
The 1815 Tourbillon does have a pair of hidden tricks up its sleeve, and both appear when pulling the crown out. First, the tourbillon itself is stopped, a rather unusual feature of the complication, and second, the seconds hand jumps to zero thanks to the zero-reset mechanism. This allows for precise time setting, giving the user the ability to align the minute hand exactly prior to restarting the watch at the top of a minute. If you have a watch with a hacking seconds, you’re likely no stranger to pulling the crown out as it crosses over the zero mark for exactly this purpose.
This zero-reset mechanism is also found on the second new release from A. Lange & Söhne, a Richard Lange Jumping Seconds sporting a pink gold dial. Again, this is a new material combination for this watch that presents an entirely new personality compared to the existing black dial. This is a regulator style watch that separates the hours, minutes, and seconds into their own distinct sub-dials, with the seconds hand dominating the top portion of the dial. Each of the subdials come together in areas of overlap, and in the negative space between the overlap of the minute and hour sub-dials, we find a small aperture that will display red when the watch is in need of a wind (signifying less than 10 hours of reserve remaining).
As the name implies, this is a jumping seconds watch, meaning the seconds hand ticks only once per second. This is facilitated by the constant force escapement that stores, and releases exactly the same amount of energy to the fourth wheel, creating an impulse once per second. This means the gear train receives the exact same amount of power throughout the entirety of the mainspring depletion. Accuracy can generally trail off in the waning hours of the reserve as the power is delivered in a non-linear fashion, but not with a constant force mechanism that stores the energy, and only releases it when it gets the amount needed.
Both of these watches are mechanical marvels, and finished in sublime fashion as you’d expect from A. Lange & Söhne. Both are also limited editions, with the 1815 Tourbillon with black enamel dial getting 50 pieces produced, and the Richard Lange Jumping Seconds with pink gold dial getting 100 pieces produced. Pricing can be had on request, naturally. A. Lange & Söhne
