A. Lange & Söhne - Lange's Numeric Coups
The king was annoyed. During the performances in Dresden's Semperoper, certain members of the audience recurrently had the audacity to activate the chiming minute repeaters of their pocket watches to find out what time it was. Any concert-goer who has ever been disturbed by a ringing cell phone in the middle of a pianissimo passage can understand his irritation. To put an end to this nuisance, King Frederick Augustus II of Saxony instructed his architect Gottfried Semper to create a stage clock for the new opera house, adding ""that it should distinguish itself from the ordinary arrangement with hands on a dial"".
In 1841, this daunting task was entrusted to Johann Christian Friedrich Gutkaes, a manufacturer of fine clocks and the royal court's chief engineer. The biggest challenge was to design a clock that would be legible from all seats in the darkened auditorium. Moreover, it had to fit in a space barely two metres high in the proscenium arch above the centre of the stage. A round dial could not meet these requirements. So Gutkaes had the ingenious idea of constructing a clock with a digital indication. It had two counter-rotating drums with a diameter of 1.6 metres that displayed the time in twin apertures high above the stage. The left-hand aperture showed the hours with Roman numerals, the one on the right indicated the minutes with Arabic numerals in five-minute intervals.
1841 was also the year in which Ferdinand A. Lange returned from his travels to the capitals of European precision horology. At the age of 15, he had begun his watchmaking apprenticeship under Gutkaes. After four years in Paris and a journey through England and Switzerland, he resumed working for his mentor, contributing many new ideas which most likely also influenced the design of the Five-Minute Clock. Its uniqueness continues to inspire the calibre engineers at A. Lange & Söhne to this very day. After 1990, they picked up the threads, first by creating the iconic outsize date of the Lange 1 as the successor of the historic paragon, then by implementing a mechanical wristwatch with a precisely jumping numeric time display: the Lange Zeitwerk.
Because of the size constraints of wristwatch movements, they decided to configure the digital time display with two adjacent apertures, creating more space for discs of notably larger dimensions. Their vision culminated in a seminal design element, a German-silver bridge that frames all time indications. The unprecedented magnitude of the display always provides an unambiguous reading of time. The minutes advance instantaneously, and at the top of the hour, all three discs synchronously move forward by one increment. A newly developed barrel with an extra-b mainspring delivers the considerable energy required for these switching cycles. A patented constant-force escapement between the barrel wheel and the balance, probably unparalleled in terms of compactness, acts as the pacemaker.
The Lange Zeitwerk is not just a further milestone for which Lange's master watchmakers can take credit, it is a design paragon of archetypal clarity that has won numerous awards, among them ""L'Aiguille d'Or"", the top prize of the prestigious ""Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Geneve"".
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