A. Lange & Söhne's story begins not in Switzerland but in Germany, in the small mining town of Glashütte, Saxony, on 7 December 1845. Ferdinand Adolph Lange, a young watchmaker trained under the Dresden court watchmaker Johann Christian Friedrich Gutkaes and educated in Paris and Switzerland, founded a watchmaking workshop in Glashütte with backing from the Saxon government, partly to provide work for miners displaced by the collapse of the Erzgebirge silver industry. It was the birth of both German watchmaking and Glashütte as a watchmaking town.
By the second half of the 19th century, A. Lange & Söhne (Adolph's eldest son Richard became a partner in 1868, which is when the firm took that name; his brother Emil followed in 1871) had grown into a world-class manufacture producing pocket watches that rivalled the very best in Switzerland. Lange developed a unique visual language: the three-quarter plate (Dreiviertelplatine), screwed gold chatons holding ruby jewels, blued screws, Glashütte stripes, and a hand-engraved balance cock. That design language remains the DNA of every Lange watch today. From Tsar Nicholas II to the Ottoman court, European nobility carried Lange pocket watches.
The Second World War brought disaster. On 8 May 1945, the day Germany surrendered, Soviet bombs destroyed Lange's main Glashütte factory. After the founding of East Germany the company was nationalised; A. Lange & Söhne formally ceased to exist in 1948 and was absorbed into the state-run VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe (GUB). The Lange name disappeared for forty years.
But the brand's story did not end there. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, on 7 December 1990, exactly 145 years after Ferdinand Adolph Lange opened his workshop, his great-grandson Walter Lange, then 66 years old, re-registered A. Lange & Söhne in Glashütte with four watchmaker friends. Walter's vision was simple: restart his great-grandfather's tradition, modern in execution and uncompromising in quality.
After four years of silent development, on 24 October 1994 Walter Lange and his managing director Günter Blümlein unveiled four watches at Dresden's Royal Palace: the Lange 1, Saxonia, Arkade and Tourbillon "Pour le Mérite." The Lange 1 became an instant icon with its asymmetric dial, outsized date and power reserve indicator, single-handedly defining the modern Lange identity. The outsized date (Großdatum) was inspired by the five-minute digital clock at Dresden's Semperoper and became the Lange signature.
The years that followed produced some of the most important complications in modern watchmaking: the Datograph (1999, which Philippe Dufour famously called "the best chronograph movement ever made"), the Double Split (2004, the world's first double rattrapante chronograph), the Zeitwerk (2009, with jumping digital hours and minutes), and the Grand Complication (2013, just six pieces, priced at roughly 1.92 million euros). Every Lange movement is assembled at least twice, once for adjustment, once for final assembly, and nearly every part is decorated by hand.
Bedesten Watches has sold A. Lange & Söhne watches in Istanbul since 1999. Visit our Suadiye store for selected Lange 1, Datograph, Zeitwerk and Saxonia references; for current listings, ask for the written inspection record and applicable guarantee terms.
