Hands-On: The A. Lange & Sohne Richard Lange Jumping Seconds

January 19, 2016

Its not too much to say that for us at HODINKEE, one of the highlights of the year is seeing new pieces from A. Lange & Sohne at the SIHH. Naturally, not everything is a home run, and if you go through our office everyone will have their own personal favorites (as well as watches they think werent entirely successful) but in general, right now, in fine watchmaking, we (and I) feel that A. Lange & Sohne is one of a very small handful of watchmaking companies really taking the necessary time, and putting in the necessary effort, to produce watches that absolutely deliver on the promise of craft and attention to detail thats implicit in the phrase haute horlogerie. ? As I said, everyone has their own personal favorites; Ive always had it pretty bad for the Richard Lange family of watches and the Richard Lange Jumping Seconds just pulled into the pole position. Its not the most complex of the Richard Lange watches, and it doesnt have the almost forbidding, and therefore very appealing, austerity of some of Langes other offerings, but I thought the watch was just conceptually a fantastic aggregation of different design and engineering elements and seeing it in person just confirmed that first impression. This is a watch thats quintessentially Lange, in that it feels like the quintessence of watchmaking. Even in platinum, its not an especially heavy watch but it has a kind of definitive solidity thats really irresistible. Its also not an especially big watch, and thats a good thing: as we reported just a few days ago, its 39.9 mm x 10.6 mm, and the sub-40 mm size goes a long way towards making this feel like the sort of really usable high precision scientific instrument for the wrist that the Richard Lange family is intended to represent. The dial composition is phenomenally appealing. Weve seen the 1807 Seyffert pocket watch inspired, regulator-style design in the Richard Lange family before, of course, but here Lange has put the jumping seconds hand C driven, you may remember, directly by the one-second constant force remontoire C front and center, and the result is a dial with a lot of animation, which at the same time manages to retain all the stately dignity of the much more complex Richard Lange Tourbillon Pour Le Merite. As is often the case with Lange, its business in the front, party in the back C the movements exactly the superlative treat you would expect from Lange. A couple of things to note: the first is that the coiled blue remontoire spring is visible through an aperture in the plate, because after all, if you have a watch with a constant force mechanism (and Lange, after all, makes something of a specialty of constant force mechanisms in its watches) its nice to see it in action. ? You can also see the wonderfully made mechanism for the return-to-zero function (remember, the watch automatically sets the jumping seconds hand to zero when you pull out the crown). The fourth wheel is disengaged from the rest of the train by a vertical clutch mechanism and here, you can actually see the two jaws of the pincers that separate the clutch plates. Subdued but definite visual pyrotechnics, a combination of both useful and really fun technical features, and of course, an effort to ensure real start-to-finish devotion to detail that very few brands bother to muster any more, makes this a major success for A. Lange & Sohne at this SIHH. At 78,000 its obviously not going to be on everyones wrist but its a testimony to Lange that the cost actually seems, even by todays insanely inflated prices standards in fine watchmaking, worth it. Follow HODINKEE's live SIHH 2016 updates here, and in our mobile app, and you can read all SIHH stories here.Visit A. Lange & Sohne online right here.