Qualla: A. Lange & Söhne

A. Lange & Söhne: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karel K., Public domain. Ferdinand Adolph Lange came back to Dresden in 1841 with a notebook full of French gear calculations and a proposal nobody in government had asked for. He wanted a licence to start a watchmaking industry in the Ore Mountains, in a valley where the silver had run out and the work had gone with it. His letter to the ministry pitched the idea as welfare rather than luxury: grant the means to establish an institution for ten or fifteen young people, put him in charge, and "livelihood and prosperity will spread among a large number of these unfortunate people." He got the licence. On 7 December 1845 he founded A. Lange & Cie in Glashütte, and for the next hundred years the fortunes of the town and the family were the same thing.

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Image: Karel K. | Public domain

A. Lange & Söhne: The Apprentice and the Five-Minute Clock

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Selbst fotografiert von Johann H. Addicks, CC BY-SA 3.0. Lange was born in Dresden on 25 February 1815, and after his parents separated he was raised by a foster family who put him through school. At fourteen he entered the city's technical institute, which split its students' week between theory and bench work. His master was Johann C...

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Image: Selbst fotografiert von Johann H. Addicks | CC BY-SA 3.0

A. Lange & Söhne: The Three-Quarter Plate

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elrond, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1864 he replaced the tangle of separate bridges holding a movement's gear train with a single plate covering three quarters of the calibre. Assembly got harder. Stability got better, and the three-quarter plate became the signature of Glashütte watchmaking, as recognisable as ...

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Image: Elrond | CC BY-SA 4.0

A. Lange & Söhne: Who Made the Chronometers

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit © 1971markus, CC BY-SA 4.0. The First World War collapsed the market for gold pocket watches, and the 1920s and 1930s emptied the workshops. Walter Lange, the founder's great-grandson, remembered the period as a childhood injury: looking out of the living-room window at the unemployed men lined up across th...

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A. Lange & Söhne: Forty-Two Years Off the Dial

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elrond, CC BY-SA 4.0. What the bombing left, the peace took. Saxony's watch companies were nationalised in 1948, and the last movement the firm developed — Calibre 28, a wristwatch version of the big observation calibre — went into production in 1949 under a different signature entirely: "Lange VEB," ...

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Image: Elrond | CC BY-SA 4.0

A. Lange & Söhne: Seven December, Again

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elrond, CC BY-SA 4.0. Walter Lange refounded the company on 7 December 1990 — one hundred and forty-five years to the day after his great-grandfather signed the original papers, and less than two months after German reunification. He did it with Günter Blümlein, a watch executive, and with help from S...

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Image: Elrond | CC BY-SA 4.0