The SIHH watch salon, which kicks off today, always offers some surprises, but also some things that can be counted on like (one should pardon the expression) clockwork: the weather will be cold, the traffic from the Palexpo to downtown Geneva will be awful, there will be much Champagne and little sleep for the assembled media guests, and A. Lange & Söhne will wow said media with at least one breathtakingly complicated timepiece. The Glashütte-based brand delivered again this year with the introduction of the Triple Split, the world’s first mechanical split-seconds chronograph that can perform multi-hour comparative time measurements.
The A. Lange & Söhne Triple Split has three sets of blued rattrapante hands.
The watch ? whose ability to measure both additive and comparative times up to an astounding 12 hours is achieved by additional rattrapante hands on both the minutes and hours-totalizing subdials ? represents the next step up in stopwatch complexity from Lange’s Double Split model, introduced back in 2004. That timepiece could make comparative measurements with an aggregate duration of 30 minutes ? already an impressive technical feat, which this new watch multiplies by a factor of 24 with its precisely jumping rattrapante minutes counter and a continuous rattrapante hour counter. One might ask, how would this type of timing be useful or applicable to real life" As Lange’s press release points out, it allows Formula 1 fans to time co...