“The ultimate Lange 1”
During the Watches and Wonders fair in April, that’s how Wilhelm Schmid, chief executive of the prestige German watchmaker A. Lange & Söhne, described the brand’s new Lange 1 Tourbillon Perpetual Calendar “Lumen”.
“It’s basically all in,” he said. “There’s nothing missing.”
The 41.9-millimeter model, limited to 50 pieces in platinum, unites two of the brand’s two signature complications, a tourbillon with stop-seconds as well as a perpetual calendar with a peripheral month ring and instantaneously switching displays, and places them beneath a smoky sapphire dial boasting a new luminous display.
“In a lot of ways, it’s what Lange does best,” says the collector Michael Hickcox, a longtime fan of the brand. “It’s unbelievably complicated and engineered — and absolutely beautiful.”
The piece, which features the new self-winding calibre L225.1 (an upgraded version of the movement that powered the Lange 1 Tourbillon Perpetual Calendar “25th Anniversary” Limited Edition, introduced in 2019), is also exceptionally discreet. Only a subtle inscription at 12 o’clock hints at the mechanical wizardry that lies within: Flip the watch over and the sapphire caseback reveals a tourbillon in full flight.
Once every sixty seconds, the skeletonized tourbillon cage completes a full rotation. Paired with an in-house balance spring — engineered and matched to its companion components with Lange’s characteristic attention to detail — the result is a movement that beats at 21,600 semi-oscillations per hour with exceptional rate accuracy.
But A. Lange & Söhne didn’t stop there. The stop-seconds mechanism, controlled simply by pulling the crown, brings the balance to an immediate standstill inside the cage, making it possible to set this grand complication to the exact second. That precision is owed to a V-shaped arresting spring, an elegantly engineered solution subtle enough to earn the manufacture a patent back in 2008.
Truth be told, all of the 685 components housed inside the new Lange 1 have been conceived and manufactured to the same exacting standards as the tourbillon. The movement’s architecture unites the whirling mechanism with a perpetual calendar and a moon-phase display, while still finding room for Lange’s signature outsize date and the stop-seconds mechanism.
The finishing reaches its zenith in the tourbillon cage, the tourbillon cock and the intermediate-wheel cock — all crafted from stainless steel and subjected to one of horology’s most unforgiving surface treatments: black polish. Achieved by hand, using specialist abrasive pastes and a controlled sliding motion across a tin plate, the technique demands exactly the right pressure, exactly the right rhythm, and a great deal of patience. The reward is a surface that shifts character depending on the light — mirror-bright from one angle, a deep jet black from another. Every edge is chamfered and polished; the internal angles, notoriously the hardest to finish cleanly, demand an almost surgical steadiness of hand.
The self-winding rotor makes its own quiet statement. Its central mass, crafted for the first time in 18-karat white gold and engraved with the A. Lange & Söhne signature, works in tandem with an external centrifugal ring in 950 platinum — a pairing that generates enough winding efficiency to deliver a maximum 50-hour power reserve.
By and large, collectors have been bowled over by the timepiece, which retails for 550,000 euros. “My new grail watch,” influencer Carsten J.W. Weiding commented on Instagram.
