Twenty years after A. Lange & Söhne first married its chronograph and a perpetual calendar with an outsize date, the German watchmaker returns to this contemporary feat of horological engineering with a hugely exclusive 50-piece limited edition.
And without missing the point entirely – which is increasingly probable when dealing with a watch as intricate and complicated as the modern Datograph – I find myself almost craning my neck staring down at the bracelet: 950 platinum and impossibly rare across the German watchmaker’s modern offerings.
For Watch of the Week this week, the A. Lange & Söhne Datograph Perpetual is an absolute stunner. Beneath all that precious metal, however, sits one of the more remarkable examples of contemporary German watchmaking.
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Normally, I’d gloss over the finer details of the inner workings of a watch – even more so when discussing a Lange, among the most intricately assembled movements in all horology. But this piece, which couples a chronograph and perpetual calendar together, is far too impressive to ignore.
The manually wound L952.1 manufacture calibre consists of 556 individual components, including 223 dedicated to the perpetual calendar mechanism. As you'd expect from Lange, the chronograph employs a traditional column wheel for precise control, alongside a flyback function that allows the wearer to stop and immediately restart an ongoing measurement with a single push. It’s remarkably accurate, measuring time within a fifth of a second.
The minute counter also jumps precisely from one minute to the next, making elapsed-time readings particularly straightforward.
Where this reference truly shines, however, is the perpetual calendar, which has been mechanically programmed to account for months of differing lengths and leap years and will continue displaying the correct date, day, and month for decades without intervention.
On 1 March 2100, however, the Gregorian calendar skips a leap day, requiring the watch to be corrected by one day. Something to let the grandkids know, I guess.
So how do these two work simultaneously? Really, it’s two complications that are independent mechanisms, each with its own job to do, but integrated into a singular movement. The chrono function deals with the day-to-day, but the perpetual calendar deals with, well, perpetuity.
What makes this even more impressive is the overt beauty of the movement – untreated German silver plates and bridges, screwed gold chatons and a hand-engraved balance cock, with the entire calibre assembled twice as part of the manufacturer’s exacting production process. Seen through the sapphire-crystal caseback, it’s almost a contemporary calling card of the long-revered German watchmakers: movements as beautiful as the pieces themselves.
Price is on request for the Datograph Perpetual, and it’s limited to just 50 individually numbered examples, making this one of the more exclusive additions to the modern Lange catalogue.
Twenty years on from the original, though, it's a fitting anniversary tribute to a watch that has always occupied an interesting intersection between market-leading technical ambition and a watch you’d be able to rock every day.