How to buy your first watch

These Richard Lange Watches Prove That Three’s a Crowd-Pleaser.

Nearly a decade ago, Anthony de Haas, A. Lange & Söhne’s director of product development, was flipping through a book of archival material when he came across an old Lange pocket watch with an unusual triple regulator dial. De Haas was intrigued but still unsure of the design’s potential for future Lange watches, so he flagged it and put the book away. Months later, the subject came up again in a talk with the brand’s director of R & D, Tino Bobe, de Haas’s friend and foil in creating new watches for A. Lange & Söhne.

“I opened the page I had marked in the book,” says de Haas. “He smiled, then got his book. He had the same watch marked out in his book as well. He said, ‘Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about this design, but I never did because I wasn’t sure it was something for Lange.’” Over the next three days the duo laid out plans for a triptych of watches that have animated the company’s Richard Lange family of timepieces until this year. Each of the three is very different, yet each in its own way advances the Richard Lange line’s technical focus on timekeeping.

A. Lange & Söhne released its first Richard Lange watch in 2006, partly as a means of showing off its relatively new hairspring-making capacity. The movement driving the first spare, three-hand watch contained a large balance wheel in the style of traditional
chronometers. Though the pieces were actually regulated to the same standards as other watches in A. Lange & Söhne’s collection, the new features spoke to traditions of accurate timekeeping. The Richard Lange was very well received and subsequent editions, including a Referenzuhr with a zero-reset feature and a Pour le Mérite model equipped with a chain-and-fusee constant-force mechanism, quickly sold out.

Lange’s first watch built on the triple regulator principle was 2011’s Richard Lange Pour le Mérite Tourbillon, which like the previous model of the same name possessed a chain-and-fusee system. It also came equipped with an as-needed retractable dial segment to complete the hours indication in the lower right portion of the dial when the hand overlapped with the tourbillon aperture/seconds indication in the lower left.