A. Lange & Söhne Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon Honeygold Lumen
Lange devotees are indulged this year at Watch & Wonders 2024 with the release of the new A. Lange & Söhne Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon Honeygold Lumen. Mark McArthur-Christie provides an insight into this sublime timepiece from Saxony, demonstrating that ‘functional things can be beautiful too’.
Beauty is good for us
Somewhere along the way, between the nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries, we forgot that everyday things should be beautiful. I’m reminded of this every time I travel to London and leave from Oxford Parkway station. From a utility point of view, Oxford Parkway is a splendid thing. It means you can leave your home miles from London at 0525 and be sitting with your first coffee near London Bridge by 0810.
But my – it’s ugly. And it’s not even ugly in a way that will eventually become fashionable. It’s ugly because it’s been designed and built with the sole consideration of minimising cost.
It’s as if a Gradgrindian figure has stood over the whole project, determined to cost-cut anything that might be beautiful or bring even the smallest smile of delight or sigh of comfort. Puritan design at its height. Parkway looks as though the work experience kid knocked up the design with an Etch A Sketch.
Beauty is good for us, we just seem to have forgotten.
So what has a commuter railway station got to do with watches? Well, a watch is a way of carrying a little beauty with us when the world is ugly. And beauty in the very smallest things – even the screws.
A. Lange & Söhne – peerless craftsmanship
The Parkway approach is to brief your procurement department to source the cheapest galvanic steel screw you can find and chip the supplier on price until there’s barely enough profit to cover the rent. The Glashütte approach is a little different. OK, so there isn’t a venerable watchmaker crafting each screw by hand, but it’s close.
A profile turning machine does a fine job of turning out screw blanks. You feed a steel bar in at one end and out pop screws from the other. But from there, a watchmaker takes over because an unpolished screw is a friend to no one. To polish a screw, take several of them and secure them in a special, tiny tool that leaves the heads proud. Then turn the tool upside down and polish the screws on a flat plate coated in diamond compound. Eventually, and with the sort of skill and patience that only proper watchmakers and heart surgeons possess, the screw heads will be tiny mirrors.
Alternatively, you could heat-blue them, using a flame, a blueing pan and a few years’ worth of skill. Either way, that’s a lot of fuss over a purely functional part that just holds a few components together. But detail like this matters, because get the little things right and you have something beautiful at the end of the process. Cut corners and it shows.
A. Lange & Söhne – the first Datograph
There are no shortcuts with this new A. Lange & Söhne Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon Honeygold Lumen, a watch where corners are carefully filed by hand and then polished. If you want to carry something of beauty with you and you’re not short of few bob, it’s a fine choice.
When Lange sent its first Datograph (chronograph with an outsize, Lange-style date – you can see what they did there) out into the world, unveiling it at the 1999 Basel Fair, it made its intentions clear. It promoted the watch not with pictures of the dial or case but with an x10 scale model of its new Caliber L951.1 movement. This was like rolling down Route de Saint-Julien in a tank and parking it right on the Swiss watch industry’s lawn. And the great-grandson of the L951.1 – the cal. L952.4 – powers this new watch.
A. Lange & Söhne Calibre L952.4
If you’re an aesthete, you can wear your Datograph Lumen the conventional way – dial out. If your interest is in engineering, Lange thoughtfully provided the watch with a sapphire display back so you can wear it movement side out. It’s not an official thing, clearly, and you’d have to do some thoroughly non-authorised fiddling with the strap but it would be worth it. Annegret Fleischer’s movement design proves that utility (it has to power the watch after all) and beauty are in no sense mutually exclusive.
On the surface of things, it’s pretty simple. The new Datograph Perpetual’s L952.4 has moved on from the original movement. It still has its flyback chronograph but also a precise jumping minute counter, perpetual calendar and a tourbillon with a stop-seconds mechanism. This new watch is in Lange’s own ‘Honeygold’ and, as a ‘Lumen’ model, it features a semi-transparent dial that glows in the dark.
The flyback chronograph complication lets you measure a series of events quickly and without the fuss of having to faff about with stopping, resetting to zero and starting the chrono again. You just push the chronograph reset button once and the hand snaps back to start again immediately. Easy for you, but a headache of levers, cams, heartpieces and precision engineering for the watchmaker.
The Datograph’s minute counter is another piece of precision work, both in manufacture and operation. Some chronograph minute hands move with the second hand. As it tracks around the dial, they track with it in tiny steps on their own subdial. Others rather lazily move as the chrono seconds hand reaches 12. The Datograph’s minute hand snaps to the next minute at the precise moment when the chrono seconds hand completes its 60th second. Again, it’s a little detail that many non-watch people simply wouldn’t notice, but you would.
A. Lange & Söhne Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon – perpetual calendar
We’re so accustomed to digital perpetual calendars nowadays, it’s easy to forget what a watchmaking triumph a mechanical version is. Hats off to the remarkable English watchmaker, Thomas Mudge, who made the first perpetual calendar we’ve found so far (always dangerous in Watchworld to be definitive about who invented what first and when) in 1762. A perpetual has to allow not just for months with different numbers of days, but leap years. The Datograph manages it so accurately that after nearly 123 years, assuming you’ve kept the watch running constantly (it has a 50 hour power reserve, so you can slack a bit) you’ll only need to make a correction of a single day to the moon-phase display.
A. Lange & Söhne Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon – stop seconds
Then there’s the tourbillon that hacks. Tourbillons in wristwatches are almost completely pointless from an accuracy point of view, which makes them wonderful because they’re there for the sake of engineering beauty.
Over a 60-second period, the tourbillon mechanism rotates the balance, lever and escape wheel inside a filigreed cage about its own axis around the stationary fourth wheel. Why bother, as a wristwatch – unlike a mostly static position pocket watch – is in regular motion? Because you can and because it’s beautiful.
As you can imagine, stopping a tourbillon is not simple. Getting it started again is even more complicated. In 2008, Lange developed a stop-seconds mechanism that means you can hack your Datograph and synchronise it to the second. Pull the crown and a lever mechanism releases a stop lever, which moves an arresting spring towards the balance. The contact pressure of the spring instantly stops both the balance and the tourbillon cage. Set the time and push the crown home and the balance and tourbillon are released; the watch instantly starts running again. Even better, you can see the whole thing happening through the sapphire-crystal caseback. Told you you’d want to wear it movement-side out.
A. Lange & Söhne Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon – flyback chronograph
The movement doesn’t get all the glory though. The dial is an object lesson in how to make the complicated simple. Remember the job here is to convey information ranging from a 1/5th of a second chronograph seconds reading to the phases of the moon. You can see the equilateral triangle formed by the outsize date and the two subsidiary dials. In turn, they look after (on the left) subsidiary seconds, day of the week and the day/night indicator. On the right side dial are the precise jumping minute counter, the month and the leap year. Underneath them, in another triangle, is the moon-phase display presented above 6 o’clock. Around the dial edge is a tachymeter scale for working out average speeds.
A. Lange & Söhne Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon – Lumen dial
The dial itself is made from coated sapphire crystal. That’s to facilitate the Datograph’s party trick (if that’s too flippant); its luminous display. The technical challenge behind this development was twofold; to produce a dial that was just transparent enough to let the components behind it take centre stage in the dark but not confuse the display in the light and to give the luminous components – including the large date wheels – enough light despite this.
Lange explains, ‘It filters out certain spectra of visible light but lets most of the UV radiation pass through. This is exactly the range that charges the glowing pigments with light energy – to make them glow in the dark. The light permeability in the visible spectrum was reduced to the point where the disc mechanism is only vaguely recognisable during the day so that the clear legibility of the time is not compromised.’
The hour and minute hands are partially lumed while the chrono seconds hand is fully coated. Neatly, it’s the subsidiary dials themselves that are luminous with the hands of the sub seconds, month, day of the week and minute counter moving above. Rather wonderfully, the moon and stars of the moonphase dial are luminous too.
A. Lange & Söhne Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon – Honeygold case
Despite housing enough Haute Horlogerie firepower to sink almost anything, this is no boot polish tin. It’s smaller in diameter (just) than a Speedmaster at 41.5 mm and a respectable 14.6 mm thick. That depth (and the use of Honeygold) means you’ll not forget its on your wrist. But, bluntly, would you want to?
A. Lange & Söhne Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon Honeygold Lumen – closing remarks
A watch like this raises some interesting questions. The first one, obviously, is ‘how much does a kidney go for nowadays?’ But then you might start thinking about what a watch like this is actually for and, rather more existentially, what it even is.
This slightly esoteric musing is all Lange’s fault. They say ‘the complications…make the timepiece into a comprehensive work of art.’ That’s a brave claim, even given Watchworld’s customary hyperbole. At this level of engineering and finish are we talking art or engineering?
I don’t see why it can’t be both. Engineering doesn’t have to be purely functional and art doesn’t have only to be decorative. With this new Lange & Söhne Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon you get a watch that reminds you, no matter how ugly the man-made world is around you, that functional things can be beautiful too.
Further reading
https://www.alange-soehne.com/
Technical specification
- Model: A. Lange & Söhne Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon Honeygold Lumen
- Reference: 740.055FE
- Case: 18-carat HONEYGOLD®, diameter 41.5 mm, height 14.6 mm, sapphire crystal to the front and exhibition caseback
- Functions: hours, minutes, subsidiary seconds, tourbillon with stop seconds, flyback chronograph with precisely jumping minute counter, tachymeter scale; perpetual calendar with outsize date, day of week, month, leap year; day/night indicator; moon-phase display
- Movement: Lange manufacture calibre L952.4, hand-wound movement, frequency 18,000 vph (2.5 Hz), contains 56 jewels, power reserve 50 hours when fully wound, 684 components
- Strap: dark brown hand-stitched alligator leather strap with deployant buckle in 18-carat HONEYGOLD®
- Price on application
- Limited Edition: 50 pieces