There’s a reason Ben – and the rest of us the team at HODINKEE – dream of the Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon. I mean, it’s a Datograph Perpetual with an added tourbillon. A watch made “just because,” A. Lange & Söhne told a group of dumbfounded journalists during their presentation at SIHH 2015. But it’s a little more complex than that.
The Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon, whose name stands proudly on the dial, combines a column-wheel chronograph with flyback function, a perpetual calendar with jumping displays, and a tourbillon, inside one of the most desirable watches of the 21st century: the Datograph. They called it “technically impressive,” which is possibly the greatest display of Saxon understatement we’ve ever come across.
The first two complications sit elegantly on the dial side while the third hides on the other, under the 12 o’clock position, performing a one-minute rotation that only 100 collectors will be able to see. It’s not the first time Lange has placed a tourbillon on the back of a watch – the Lange 1 Tourbillon Perpetual Calendar is another example – however this is a new kind of tourbillon for Lange.
A first for A. Lange & Söhne, who continues to improve its stop-seconds tourbillon introduced in 2008 with the Cabaret Tourbillon (a watch brilliantly explained here), is the slower frequency of the balance (18,000 semi-oscillations instead of 21,600), which allows stopped-times to be displayed with an accuracy of one-fifth of a second.
So too is the level of finishing on Caliber L952.2. The expectations we hold for Lange movements should not diminish the unbelievable and obvious care they receive. The hands that decorate Lange movements do so, not only with expert accuracy, but also with apparent love.
On the dial side, Lange proves that it’s possible to create a watch that displays a lot of information in a coherent, minutely precise, and intuitive way – it's cleaner even than the Datograph Perpetual. All the indications of the perpetual calendar, including the day, oversized “darth” date windows, moon, and leap year are displayed clearly. The perpetual calendar will, like all perpetual calendars, not require readjustment until the year 2100, and if the watch hasn't run for a few days you can advance all indications simultaneously using a single pusher at 10 o'clock. Meanwhile, rhodium-plated, solid-gold hands remind us of the main objective of the watch – that of telling the time.
But one of our favorite details remains the new placement of the power-reserve indicator, which now completes the three-quarter tachymeter scale, adding balance to the left side of the dial. It’s slim, but has a commanding presence, providing a touch of color on an otherwise very monochromatic dial (the only other touches of color are the blue of the moon-phase disk, and the red number 4 in the leap year indicator), which makes the last hours of the power reserve appear very clearly.
The Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon is the type of watch you want to be wearing while standing alone in an empty room, several feet away from any sharp edges. But really, you don’t want to risk damaging that 41.5 mm platinum case, and since it sits 14.6 mm above the wrist, that’s a very real possibility. Despite its size (or maybe even partly because of it) this is a watch that impresses on every level, and we think it succeeds brilliantly at doing what A. Lange & Söhne clearly intended it to do: to be in every way a tour de force manifestation of the very finest traditionally oriented watchmaking of which Lange is capable.
Case: Platinum. 41.5 mm x 14.6 mm. Manually wound Lange Caliber L952.2. 2.5 Hz frequency/18,000 vph. 50-hour power reserve. Hours and minutes; subsidiary-seconds dial; tourbillon with patented stop-seconds; flyback chronograph with precisely jumping minute counter; tachymeter scale; perpetual calendar with outsize date, day of week, month, and leap year; day/night indicator; moon-phase display; power-reserve indication. Limited edition of 100 watches. Priced at €295,000. Visit A. Lange & Söhne here.
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