Watchmakers are apt to celebrate anniversaries – they are timekeepers, after all – but few of them are freighted with as much meaning as the 30th birthday of the Lange 1, the not-so-simple four-hand watch (with calendar and power reserve function) that relaunched the illustrious A Lange & Söhne brand in 1994. Although the numbers don’t add up to much, those 30 years – during which Lange’s watches have risen to the first rank of haute horological products – stand on the shoulders of some of the most testing circumstances any company is likely to endure.
Founded in Glaschütte, Saxony, in 1845 by Ferdinand Adolphe Lange, the business operated in a region twice reduced to near-ruin by global conflicts in the first half of the 20th century. It was the second of these that cost A Lange & Söhne most dearly, when the East German government expropriated the factory in 1948, forcing Ferdinand’s grandson Walter to flee to the West, where he established a business distributing Swiss-made alarm clocks. The chance to return came in 1990, after the reunification of Germany, when Walter teamed up with Günter Blümlein, a German businessman who had already successfully rescued Jaeger-LeCoultre and IWC from the doldrums of the quartz crisis.
