Although A. Lange & Söhne occupies a tiny fraction of the pie that is easily dwarfed by its Swiss counterparts, it doesn’t mean that its watches aren’t sought after. In fact, the following watches are the ones particularly favoured by Malaysian collectors according to Sincere Fine Watches.
1815 Up/Down
The watch bears Ferdinand Adolph Lange’s, founder of A. Lange & Söhne, birth year. The overture to the A. Lange & Söhne’s founding in 1845 began when Ferdinand was training as a watchmaker under the tutelage of Johann Christian Friedrich Gutkaes in 1830.
He subsequently became a partner of his guru’s precision watchmaking workshop and eventually married the latter’s daughter, before opening his own workshop, heralding the birth of A. Lange & Söhne.
The design of the 1815 is characterised by traditional style elements: blued hands, Arabic numerals and the railway-track minute scale, it is a worthy ambassador of Lange’s watchmaking heritage.
The up/ down refers to the brand’s iconic up/down power reserve indicator, a device first used in historical pocket watches and marine chronometers. It dates back to a Lange patent granted in 1879.
Lange 1 Moon Phase
When A. Lange & Söhne held its first public presentation of its collection in 1994, the Lange 1 was one of the four models launched.
According to Walter Lange, the Lange 1 truly manifested the high standard of A. Lange & Söhne watches.
It was a men’s wristwatch that had never been built this way before, in gold or platinum, with an off-centre dial for the hours and minutes, subsidiary seconds, a power reserve indicator and the globally unique outsizeddate display, which meanwhile, has been imitated over and over again.
Introduced in 2002, the Lange 1 Moon Phase is an evolution of the original Lange 1, retaining the aesthetic elements that made the original a huge success such as the off-centre dial.
But at the same time, it also incorporates a newly developed movement and a moon-phase display with an integrated day/night indication, featuring a mechanism that ensures the moon always orbits against a realistic backdrop—a bright blue sky by day and a dark blue starry sky at night.
Richard Lange Perpetual Calendar “Terraluna”
Although 14 days of power reserve isn’t the longest among A. Lange & Söhne’s stable of watches, it is still comfortably more than many timepieces out there, manual winding or otherwise.
The watch is named after the second generation and son of Ferdinand, Richard Lange, whose time helming the manufacture was characterised by the production of exquisite pocket watches.
Besides hours, minutes and seconds, the regulator dial of the Richard Lange Perpetual Calendar “Terraluna” also accommodates the four precisely jumping perpetual calendar displays: date, day of week, month and leap year.
The patented orbital moonphase display can be admired through the sapphire crystal caseback of the watch. It shows the current moonphase as well as the position of the moon and sun as an observer in the Northern Hemisphere would see them.
The day and night halves of this hemisphere are also discernible.