From the day of its release on October 24, 1994, the Lange 1 is probably the best-known watch in the catalog of the Glashütte brand A. Lange & Söhne. And with good reason - the prototype large date display was the first in modern history, and dial layouts were rare at the time. Since then, the range and reputation of the collection has grown, with all Lange 1 watches using some iteration of the original caliber L901.0 movement, immediately recognizable thanks to its three-eighths German silver quarter plate. Last month, A. Lange & Söhne updated the collection's travel watch for the third time since its initial release in 2005, the A. Lange & Söhne Lange 1 Time Zone watch replica, which will become the definitive Lange 1 with an updated version of the L901.0.
The model I spent time with is the reference 136.029 replica in white gold case with black solid silver dial and rhodiumed gold hands. The other two new models are the reference 136.032 replica in pink gold with solid silver argenté dial and pink gold hands, and the 100-piece limited-edition reference 136.021 replica, which is done in yellow gold with solid silver champagne dial and yellow gold hands.
While the dial is changed and the movement is new, the case size remains untouched. Measuring 41.9mm-wide, 10.9mm-thick, and with a lug-to-lug height of 50mm, the Lange 1 Time Zone replica is sized for contemporary tastes. It’s not the thinnest manual-wind watch, but this is permissible considering the complexity and robustness of the L141.1 movement with its 448 components.
The most immediately noticeable change is to the 24-hour display. Formerly, this was implemented in the new A. Lange & Söhne Lange 1 men's watch replica through the relatively simple expedient of nestling two small sub-dials with pointers in the home time and time-zone dials. This works and was hardly a fatal flaw from a design standpoint (the original Lange 1 Time Zone is one of the most popular Lange 1 models), but in the interest of greater clarity, this is changed in the new model. Instead of separate dials, we now have, in the center of each of the main dials, a rotating disk divided across its diameter by a blue sector. These disks rotate once every 24 hours, and whenever the hour hand is over the blue sector, it's PM for that time zone. A pusher at 8:00 adjusts the city ring in one-hour increments (as per the usual custom, there are 24 reference cities for each time zone with a full hour offset from GMT), and there's a pusher at 10:00 to adjust the big date. The mechanism for advancing the city ring is a complex one as the pusher for incrementing the city ring has to advance the city ring, time zone hour hand, and day/night disk simultaneously; 67 components make up the entire corrector system.
Reached by Zoom (what else), Lange's Director Of Product Development Anthony de Haas told us that the reason for an AM/PM indication in the larger of the two dials – which is the home time dial as the watch is usually set up – is owing to the fact that it's possible to set the hour hand in the main time-zone dial independently. You do this by pulling the crown out to the second position and holding down the pusher for advancing the hour hand in the time-zone dial. Normally, when setting the time by the crown, the hour hands are synchronized along with the minute hands, but this maneuver decouples the hour hands and lets you use the larger of the two dials for local time, with the smaller dial on home time. If there's no day/night indication in the (larger) home time dial, there is no way of knowing, if you decide to use it as a local time dial, whether or not the big date will switch correctly at midnight. Apparently, says de Haas, Lange realized this a bit late in the development of the original Lange 1 Time Zone, and it was something of a scramble to implement a second day/night indication in time for the deadline of the first release.
Another small but useful addition is a change in the pointer which indicates the time zone reference city. It still performs its basic function of showing the correct reference city for the time-zone dial, but it now includes a small window which shows you whether or not that city is one in which Daylight Saving Time/Summer Time is observed – red for DST and white if DST is not observed.
With the dial off and city ring removed (above), L141.1's cadrature (that's the term for under-the-dial work – it occurs to me that there must be a German equivalent which I ought to know, but don't) is visible. You can see the two disks for the 24-hour indicators, as well as the paddle-shaped red and white indicator for DST or the lack thereof.
A natural question to ask is whether or not you could arrange things so that the time-zone indicator only shows red when DST is actually in effect in the city in question. de Haas says that while this is technically possible, it would be extremely complex. The dates for DST where it is observed vary from city to city, and so not only would the indication have to be controlled by a perpetual calendar, there would have to be a separate more or less ad hoc mechanical solution for each city. A big part of the challenge would be that calendrical complications are really exercises in encoding cyclical patterns – you can make a perpetual calendar partly because the Leap Year occurs with regularity, once every four years, and always at the transition from February to March.
Summer Time rules, on the other hand, follow no natural rhythm. They are set arbitrarily by different nations (on top of everything else, they are more or less six months apart in the Northern and Southern hemispheres) which makes the problem even harder. Such a watch, says de Haas, is technically feasible, but making it work reliably would be an enormous challenge, and it would make for a watch at least three times as expensive as the current A. Lange & Söhne Lange 1 Time Zone replica – and all that for a complication whose benefit would be difficult to see as justifying the greatly increased cost by potential clients. (I would love to see Lange do it, but then I love complexity for its own sake, which as far as evaluating complications is concerned, is a character flaw or at least a lapse in taste).
The watch is easy to understand, even easy to use, and intuitive to operate. You get all the usual A. Lange & Söhne replica very high quality fit, finish and overall exceptional aesthetics (front and back) that continue to make the Lange 1 time zone really sweetens the deal. Prices, $52,900 for the white and pink gold models; $56,100 for the yellow gold limited edition.
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