In a recent issue of WatchTime, we took a look at a century-plus of notable timepieces from A. Lange & Söhne. Here are seven highlight pieces and the stories behind them.
42500 Grande Complication (1902)
Lange 42500 Grand Complication (front)
This pocketwatch is the second-most complicated timepiece ever made under the A. Lange & Söhne name. (The first is a modern-day wristwatch version of the piece.) Its original owner, a Viennese named Heinrich Schäfer, paid 5,600 German marks for it in 1902, a sum that could have bought a large house. Instead, he opted for a large dose of mechanical complexity. The watch is a grand complication in the strictest use of the term: a watch with a perpetual calendar, split-seconds chronograph and minute repeater (in addition, it has petite and grande sonneries). The 42500 also has a foudroyante (French for ?lightning?) seconds display, in which the seconds hand spins around its subdial once per second, showing 1/5-second increments. The movement has 833 components, housed in an artistically decorated rose-gold case fitted with a seven-part enamel dial. The initials ?JAP,? for Jules Audemars and Edward Piguet, founders of Audemars Piguet, appear on the gong block. Audemars Piguet may in fact have made not just the gongs but the entire movement: in those days, it was common for European watch companies to buy raw movements from Swiss companies and finish them to their own specifications.
Lange 42500 Grand Complication (back)
The wat...