Feature: 6 Things You’ve Got To Know About A. Lange & Söhne

For this week’s “In Focus”, we’re taking a closer look at the watchmaker everyone loves to love—and can’t pronounce—A. Lange & Söhne. With a level of quality that defies belief, A. Lange & Söhne truly deserves a week in the spotlight—and that’s exactly what we’re giving it. As well as videos, you’ll also find some great articles being posted over the week, here, on watchfinder.com and other fun stuff on our Instagram channel, too. For now, let’s take a look at six things you didn’t know about A. Lange & Söhne. Scroll down for the second part.

Part I

A. Lange & Söhne Barely Makes Any Watches

So how many watches does this watchmaker make per year, anyway? To hazard a guess, you’d say that number was pretty low, what with the exclusivity and all. Whilst there’s no definitive answer for how many tickers come out of the Rolex factory per annum, industry sources place that number somewhere around the 800,000 to the million mark. Of watches. Per year. That’s a lot. Laid out end to end, they’d still be shorter than the waiting list for a Daytona.

But Rolex, that’s your everyday watch, the one you wear when you fix your motorbike and fight bears and whatever it is people do outdoors these days. An A. Lange & Söhne … it’s a bit more special than that. A lot more special. We’re talking more in the region of something like a Patek Philippe.

By comparison, Patek Philippe makes some 60,000 or so watches every year, less than 7% what Rolex does. And that’s because it’s a much more prestigious brand, of course. Each watch requires more care and attention from the 2,000 employees working for the business, and thus the output is lower. Like Audi said of its R8—it’s the slowest car its ever built, and the same is true of Patek Philippe. Quality takes time.

So how many watches would you wager A. Lange & Söhne manages every year? The same as Patek Philippe? A bit less perhaps? Half, even? Try 5,000. A microscopic 10% of Patek Philippe’s output, and barely half a percent of Rolex’s.

The reason its numbers are so low? The watch itself. There are simply not enough people capable of producing this level of extreme quality—that many would say pips even Patek Philippe—in the Saxony region A. Lange & Söhne is based in, to make more. And the training, done in-house, is so extensive that boosting those numbers is almost an impossibility, enrolling less than twenty students per year.

The only other option to make more watches would be to make them faster, to sacrifice quality—and that’s an absolute no-no. For this incredible German watchmaker, compromise just isn’t an option.

A. Lange & Söhne Builds Every Watch Twice

One of the reasons even an entry-level watch from A. Lange & Söhne commands such a plump asking price is how it’s built. We’re talking hand-finished parts assembled by some of the finest watchmakers in the world. We’ve already established just how unique and sought-after these people are for their craft. If you laid them out end to end, they probably wouldn’t get any work done.

So, you would say that their time is precious, that every minute of their experienced attention is best spent doing the job right and therefore doing it just once. Well, you’d think so, but A. Lange & Söhne does things a little differently. Follow along with me here.

Every A. Lange & Söhne watch starts in its component parts, which are then carefully assembled by a highly skilled watchmaker. With me so far? Good. Then … the watchmaker takes it all apart. Madness. But it gets madder still, because faced with the same pile of parts they started with, the watchmaker proceeds to assemble the watch a second time.

Now hang on, you must be thinking. Why don’t they just build it once, build twice as many and double their profit? Aha, now that makes sense to any ordinary person, but when you’re as obsessive as A. Lange & Söhne, you may as well be asking them to get the teenage intern to build it.

The reason behind this bizarre, almost compulsive behaviour may not be efficient, but it is incredible: the famous three-quarter plate style found on so many A. Lange & Söhne watches brings class-leading rigidity to the movement, but it also comes at a cost. Where separate bridges are easily adjustable, the single plate is not, and so repeated removal of the plate to make adjustments is required. And because this interaction can leave marks on the components, however faint, it’s only after this process is done that the components are properly finished and cleaned before final assembly—leaving the movement as close to perfect as possible, even if it does have to be built twice.

A. Lange & Söhne Never Mentions Its Founding

If you’ve spent even five minutes around watchmakers, you’ll have noticed such extreme overuse of a single word that it will have lost all meaning: heritage. Heritage is to watchmaking like carbon is to all of life: without it, there is none. If you laid out every instance of the word end to end it would reach the moon and back. Not our moon, Kepler-1625b’s—and that’s not even in our solar system.

And there’s an unwritten rule: the more instances of the word you find, the less likely the brand is to have earnt it. It’s like a placeholder for the real thing, what annoying writers call “show, don’t tell”. If you’ve got heritage, show me some examples, don’t just tell me you have it.

No more present is this phenomenon than in watch companies that “borrowed” their name from a business long since deceased. It’s part of the three-phase plan to starting up a modern watchmaking firm: step one, revive an old name, repeat the word “heritage” over and over again for step two—step three, profit. It’s just the way of things.

A. Lange & Söhne, on the other hand, flips this whole thing on its head. Look on its website, in its press releases—anywhere—and you won’t find the watchmaker directly stating the most prominent piece of heritage a watchmaker can have, its founding in 1845. This is when Ferdinand Adolph Lange received approval from the Royal Saxon Ministry of the Interior to start his watchmaking business, and indeed the entire industry of watchmaking in the now-famous region.

Why is this? Well, a century later, A. Lange & Söhne’s factory was bombed, destroying it completely. Then, under Soviet rule, the watchmaking region was compiled into one singular entity, producing watches under rule of the state. It wasn’t until the reunification of Germany in 1990 that A. Lange & Söhne was free to operate under its own name again, when Walter Lange, Ferdinand’s great-grandson and himself a watchmaker, revived the business from the rubble.

Literally, from the rubble. There was not a scrap of the watchmaker as it had been in its heyday of which to speak. Everything you see now is born of those new beginnings, inspired by the legacy of Walter’s lineage, from his memory of the family business as it had once existed. Officially, the company, as it stands today, was founded in 1990, not 1845. A technicality of the most pedantic kind, I’m sure you’d agree, and one most other watchmakers would—and very often do—gloss over.

But for A. Lange & Söhne, this is the kind of exacting level of attention to minute detail that most would ignore that makes it wholly unique in its quest for perfection. They think differently. More critically, more transparently. Ferdinand Lange believed that “The entire pursuit of a watchmaker should be the perfection of each and every watch”, and indeed of the business itself. So, instead of pushing their heritage, they go against the grain and choose to talk with their watches instead. Show, don’t tell.

Part II

A. Lange & Söhne’s German Silver Isn’t Made Of Silver

If you’re one of the privileged few who’ve been able to look with your own eyes through the back of an A. Lange & Söhne watch, you’ll appreciate what I’m about to say next. Most luxury watch movements, even very high-end ones, feel very monochrome, bar a few dots and dashes of pink and gold here and there. The rhodium plated brass often seen in Swiss movement manufacture is a staple of the past, easy to work with at that fine level with a layer of bright white rhodium to protect it from corrosion.

It’s not unattractive by any means—but in comparison to a calibre from A. Lange & Söhne, standard feels a bit … standard. Peer into the back of one of these German delights and your eyes will feast upon a rich, golden hue—and not just from the engraved lettering, but from the movement itself. Perhaps that’s what was in Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase. But what specifically? German silver.

German silver is used extensively not just by A. Lange & Söhne, but by many of the watchmakers in the Glashütte area. This is in part because it was A. Lange & Söhne that first established watchmaking in the region in the first place, and also because the properties of German silver have many benefits over its Swiss counterpart.

Something A. Lange & Söhne founder Ferdinand Lange was absolutely set on from the beginning was utter perfection. If he were to compete as an unknown from this unknown region, he would have to make sure that every part of every watch was pushed to its absolute limit. This is where the process of building each watch twice comes from, the use of the harder to adjust but overall more rigid three-quarter plate too, set with infinitely tuneable but ultimately far more time-consuming screwed chatons.

And it was German silver that replaced the softer brass typically used as well. Mechanically, it suits the movement far better, and visually it is very appealing—but there’s a downside. It’s very, very easy to mark. The final assembly, after all that adjustment and finishing, and with the movement sealed inside the watch, ends with a sigh of relief every time.

But hold on … because it’s not actually German silver. It’s not anyone’s silver, because there’s not a trace of the precious metal to be seen in its composition. Rather, it’s an alloy of copper, nickel and zinc, formulated for hardness and named so because, well, because it comes from Germany and it looks a little bit like silver.

A. Lange & Söhne Beat Patek Philippe To The Chronograph

So, you’ve got your time-only watches at the one end of the scale and your grand complications at the other, but the sweet spot of a high-end watchmaker’s collection—at least for me—has always been the chronograph. A good, hand-wound chronograph offers a balance between reservedness and excess that gets my pituitary gland firing a dopamine 21-gun salute. Anything from a Seagull 1963 to a Patek Philippe 5172G—yes, yes, yes.

And that Patek Philippe 5172G surely has to be the pinnacle, doesn’t it? That hand-wound, in-house calibre CH 29-535 PS, replete with column wheel, horizontal clutch, instant-change minute counter—it’s the benchmark example, the best, the first—or is it?

It might surprise you to learn that Patek Philippe’s CH 29-535 PS does not share the same expansive legacy as the brand itself. Yes, it was the illustrious watchmaker’s first in-house, pure chronograph—but it only came out in 2009. Before then, well, there was no before then. Aside from the rattrapante CHR 27-535 PS that came out a few years earlier in 2005, it was the first basic chronograph the company had ever made for a wristwatch.

Now, there’s a good reason for this, and the compounded version goes that after pocket watches evolved into wristwatches, the illustrious manufacturers of high-end calibres—like Patek Philippe—found the chronograph had fallen into a bit of a no-man’s land. Struggling to recoup the business with slim, complication-free wristwatches, and satiating a handful of clients with incredibly complicated pocket watches, there wasn’t enough demand to warrant the investment in what is actually a surprisingly complicated wristwatch movement: the chronograph.

So, they—the top three, Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin and Audemars Piguet—all sourced their chronograph movements elsewhere, preferring instead to focus their efforts on the finish. And, for Patek Philippe, that was the case right up until 2009. But what’s all this got to do with A. Lange & Söhne? Well, you’d probably never have guessed it, but the German watchmaker’s in-house, wristwatch chronograph calibre L951.1, first debuted in the Datograph in 1999, not just a few years before Patek Philippe’s but a full decade earlier.

A. Lange & Söhne Has Seiko To Thank For Its Success

Like an award-winning actor might list the people who made their journey to stardom possible in a tearful acceptance speech, there are a raft of names A. Lange & Söhne owes the success it has today to. Ferdinand Lange, of course, his great-grandson Walter who revived the business, Günter Blümlein, the legend who helped Walter realise his dream, Wilhelm Schmid, who’s steered the ship for the last decade—and many more besides.

But one name you might not expect to see in that list is Seiko. But yet, even if it is a small part in the blockbuster that is A. Lange & Söhne’s phenomenal rise to universal acclaim, it’s there. Let’s rewind a little bit and talk for a moment about Anthony de Haas.

As job roles go, there aren’t many in the watch business more influential than the one Anthony de Haas occupies. He’s Director of Product Development for A. Lange & Söhne, and has been since 2004, responsible for, oh, I don’t know, a couple of little projects you might have heard of like the Zeitwerk and the Triple Split.

His no-nonsense approach to building watches is a big part of what modern day A. Lange & Söhne has to thank for the critical acclaim it continues to enjoy. He’s a stickler for detail, arguably the Steve Jobs of watchmaking—minus the weird spiritual and personal hygiene issues, of course. De Haas even took watchmaking’s most notoriously delicate—read, breakable—complication, the minute repeater, and made it—in his words—idiot-proof. If you want any more evidence of the man’s dedication to perfection, he’s also a drummer. Need I say more.

In fact, young De Haas’ dream was to be a drummer, but he had no drums so he went to tool-making school so he could build his own, and from there his fascination in micromechanics grew—into a six-year long course. He qualified as a watchmaker and has since held technical positions at the likes of IWC and complications powerhouse Renaud et Papi—but his first few years were spent somewhere more humble, where his young, malleable mind was shaped: Seiko.

Now, there’s no saying just how much De Haas has been influenced by his time at Seiko, but given Seiko’s reputation for incredible efficiency and technicality, there must be some part of his time there that has steered the way he guides A. Lange & Söhne from project to project. And had he not worked at Seiko for that period, who knows where his career might have gone next? That means, however small a footnote it may be, that A. Lange & Söhne owes a tiny nod to Seiko.

If you enjoyed this article, you can look forward to next week’s “In Focus” stories from the luxury watch brand that came in at number four. Any guesses as to who that might be? In the meantime, don’t forget to catch up on all the articles posted throughout the week here at watchfinder.com, if you haven’t already.

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