A Lange & Söhne
LANGE 31 LIMITED EDITION The passion project celebrating its 1oth anniversary
A potent combination of German technical efficiency and an almost irrepressibly boyish delight in the art of watchmaking, the Lange 31 was a labour of love for Glashüttebased watchmakers A Lange & Söhne. The challenge? A watch that runs, accurately, for 31 days when fully wound. “It’s a watch that we launched 10 years ago,” says CEO Wilhelm Schmid. “In those days, to come up with a watch that had a month of power reserve was unheard of.”
“In 2007, we launched the first version of the Lange 31,” says director of product development Anthony de Haas. “I think it was in 2004, we were looking at the longest power reserve in the market. Almost as a joke, we said, ‘10 days, 12 days, seven days, eight days is nice, but if you want to be serious we should try and make something that lasts a month’. And at the beginning we all thought this was a joke… but then, you know, why not try it?”
It was a challenge. “I always find it mindblowing to understand that the length of the springs in that watch is almost representing my height,” says Schmid, “and I’m not a short boy, I’m 1m 83cm!” Indeed, to begin with, de Haas needed to source mainsprings 1m 85cm long — far longer than any that existed at the time — and acquire them while keeping his project a secret for fear of rivals getting the jump on them.
“We don’t make our mainsprings. In the industry there are only two suppliers,” says de Haas. “When we sent these calculations to our supplier, they said, ‘Oh? What are you working on?’ and, of course, we didn’t want to tell them because it was so new. So I said, ‘I can’t tell you.’ They said, ‘Oh, is it a table clock, or something?’ And I said… ‘Yeah, it’s a table clock. But don’t tell anyone!’” All five initial speculative prototypes worked and the Lange 31 swiftly moved from being an experimental curiosity to a fully blown passion project.
Key to the success of the Lange 31 is the remontoir escapement. “It sounds very complicated!”, laughs de Haas. “You know, ‘constant force, blah blah blah’ — technicians say, ‘Yeah!’ and the normal people say, ‘Huh?’.” In essence, the remontoire system is a thin spring which powers the escapement by constantly being recharged by the watch’s two enormous mainsprings. “Every 10 seconds it’s at max and then it goes slightly down, and then it’s rewound again,” de Haas says. “But you create an average, which is constant, over 31 days. So the watch not only runs for 31 days, but throughout these 31 days there is constant force, which is the best solution for precision timekeeping.”
A Lange & Söhne is known for its sleek designs and the Lange 31 is no exception. “There is what I call the two souls of our watch,” says Schmid, “the very clean, subtle, understated design and dial, and then the opulence, and the technical aesthetics of the movement. So if you turn the watch around you see the opposite of what you have on the face.”
A decade on, the Lange 31 has aged well as it’s undergone a series of iterations, though the white gold model is surely the most appealing. “First we launched it in platinum,” says de Haas, “and then we had the pink gold version, and this is such a gorgeous version in white gold with the dark grey dial and the dark brown strap. It’s beautiful! I really like the watch. And it’s big but the design is still very understated. You know, you can make watches with perpetual calendars and tourbillons — it’s very obvious that they’re very expensive and complicated. This is expensive and complicated but it’s more like a stealth complication. You have a dial, a beautiful dial, you have an elegant watch, and then mechanically, it’s a bomb, it’s a rocket, it’s wow!”
It’s a technical feat that has proven hard to equal. “Even today, no other manufacture can really come out with numbers regarding a month,” says Schmid, “which tells you a lot.”
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