Today, we’ll review a special watch… Sure, it looks stunning, but there’s far more about this watch than just its pretty face. The best quality fake A. Lange & Söhne 1815 Rattrapante Honeygold represents many things. First of all, it’s always a pleasure to see an A. Lange & Söhne made of 18k Honeygold, the brand’s proprietary gold alloy, always reserved to special occasions. Second, this watch celebrates the founder of both the watchmaking industry in Glashütte and the Lange brand. Finally, and this is hard to believe after so many watches with a chronograph function, but this is the first stand-alone split-seconds chronograph of A. Lange & Söhne replica. Superbly executed and quite spectacular… Let’s dive into the details that make this 1815 Rattrapante Honeygold a pretty special watch.
HOMAGE TO F.A. LANGE AND TO 175 YEARS OF WATCHMAKING IN GLASHÜTTE
The white gold case replica A. Lange & Söhne 1815 Rattrapante Honeygold is part of an important trilogy of watches for the brand – all executed in the same proprietary gold alloy and all bearing the “Homage to F.A. Lange” appellation: the present 1815 Rattrapante Honeygold, the Tourbograph Perpetual Honeygold and this 1815 Thin Honeygold. All three models hail from the 1815 family, a collection of watches that celebrate the birth year of founder Ferdinand Adolph Lange.
This year is the 175th anniversary of the establishment of the watchmaking industry in the small town (almost a village) of Glashütte, near Dresden, Saxony. While several brands from this region are celebrating this jubilee – for instance, Nomos – this has a double meaning for A. Lange & Söhne. Indeed, on 7 December 1845, Ferdinand Adolph Lange founded his pocket watch workshop in Glashütte. Thus, not only it is a celebration for the whole Saxon industry, but an even more special one for Lange, whose founder also laid the foundations of Germany’s venerable precision watchmaking industry.
His entrepreneurial project of bringing an unheard-of industry to an impoverished region close to Dresden was a gamble. The mountains of Glashütte, once a source of iron ore, were depleted and unemployment was rampant. With no trained watchmakers, F.A. Lange’s gamble paid off thanks to his incorporation of novel production techniques, new precision measuring instruments and his obsession with consistent high quality. Instead of entrusting one pocket watch to one watchmaker, he got his employees to specialise in different processes (division of labour) creating a veritable production line.
The brand A. Lange & Söhne copy will be revived by Walter Lange (who passed away in 2017), a direct descendant of F.A. Lange, in 1990 together with Günter Blümlein. The first collection will be presented in 1994, with 4 watches: Lange 1, Saxonia, Arkade and Tourbillon “Pour le Mérite.” As such, ALS is still a relatively young brand, which has, however, achieved so much in a short period of time.
THE CHRONOGRAPH, A LANGE SPECIALITY
The first collection of A. Lange & Söhne (1994) didn’t yet comprise a chronograph. But it only took 5 years to the brand to introduce what will become one of the definitive movements in this field, the Datograph. We have to remember two things. First of all, in 1999, few brands had in collection their own, in-house developed and produced chronograph movement. Patek or Vacheron didn’t have yet such a movement and all relied on externally-sourced calibres… Second, not only Lange was able to come with a stunning movement (a movement that became a reference for the rest of the industry), but the brand was still in its infancy, making it even more impressive. From this day onwards, the brand will be regarded as a major actor of the “chronograph scene.”
And then, things moved fast. In 2004, the brand came with another chronograph masterpiece, the Double-Split watch – also regarded as a watch with one of the most impressive movements currently available. While the rattrapante is, without doubt, one of the most complex mechanisms that watchmaking can produce, ALS pushed the concept even further by splitting both the seconds but also the minutes – and add to that a flyback functionality. The brand even outdid itself with the spectacular, mightier-than-mighty Triple Split of 2018, an insanely complex chronograph with three rattrapante functions capable of splitting seconds, minutes and hours. In between, there have been “simpler” chronographs like this 1815 Flyback model and more daring combinations like the Datograph Perpetual Tourbillon and the extraordinary black leather strap fake A. Lange & Söhne 1815 Rattrapante Perpetual Calendar launched in 2013. And what about the Tourbograph Perpetual, with a combination of a rattrapante chronograph, a one-minute tourbillon, a perpetual calendar and a fusée-and-chain transmission. No doubt, A. Lange & Söhne is one of the masters of the chronograph.