A. Lange & Söhne has released two limited editions of the 1815 Up/Down

A. Lange & Söhne has released two limited editions of the 1815 Up/Down with blue dials in a 37.5mm case, 300 pieces in white gold and 300 in pink gold, at around 45,000 euro each. They are lovely, and the reason to write about them is the small hand on the left side of the dial marked AUF and AB.

 

Those words mean up and down, and the hand shows how much power is left in the mainspring. Most people glance at a power reserve indicator, decide it looks nice, and never think about what it took to put it there.

 

Source: Hodinkee.com

Why a Hand-Wound Watch Needs One

An automatic watch tops itself up all day from the motion of your arm, so unless you leave it in a drawer it stays wound and the question rarely comes up. A hand-wound watch has no such help. You wind it in the morning, and from that moment the spring is running down with nothing to replenish it.

 

The trouble is that a mainspring gives you no warning. It feels roughly the same through most of its range, it stops feeling like anything useful before the barrel is full, and a watch running low on power keeps perfect time until the moment it stops. Winding blind means either overwinding against the stop every day or discovering at four in the afternoon that your watch quit at lunch.

 

So watchmakers built an indicator, and the way it works is more interesting than the display suggests.

 

Source: Hodinkee.com

Counting in Two Directions at Once

The mechanism has to know two things at the same time. How much spring you have added by turning the crown, and how much the watch has consumed since. The answer is the difference between them, and there is no single wheel in a movement that carries that number.

 

The solution is a differential gear, which is the same idea that lets the two driven wheels of a car turn at different speeds through a corner. One side of the differential is driven by the winding, turning in one direction as you add power. The other side is driven by the barrel as it unwinds, turning the opposite way. The centre of the differential ends up moving according to the difference between the two inputs, and that movement drives the hand on the dial.

 

Wind the crown and the hand climbs toward AUF. Wear the watch and it falls back toward AB. It is doing continuous subtraction, mechanically, in a space a few millimetres across, and it has to be geared precisely enough that the hand arrives at the end of its scale at the same moment the barrel runs out. Lange gives this calibre 72 hours, so a Friday evening wind carries the watch to Monday morning.

Source: Hodinkee.com

What the Money Buys

Forty-five thousand euro is a serious price for a watch with hours, minutes, small seconds and that power reserve hand, so it is worth being specific about where it goes.

 

The plates and bridges are German silver, an alloy of copper, nickel and zinc, and Lange leaves them unplated. Most manufacturers coat their movements in rhodium, which keeps them bright and makes them easy to handle. Untreated German silver has to be assembled with gloves because a fingerprint marks it permanently, and over the years it develops a warm golden tone as it oxidises. The movement in this watch will not look the same in 2050, and that is the point.

 

Every Lange movement is also built twice. It is assembled completely, regulated, tested, and then taken entirely apart so the components can be cleaned and finished, after which it goes back together for good. The second assembly means the finishing survives the fitting process instead of picking up marks during it.

Then there is the balance cock, which is engraved by hand on every single watch. No two are identical, the engraver's work varies slightly, and if you own two Langes you can tell them apart by looking. The rest of the movement carries Glashütte striping, gold chatons held by blued screws, and the sort of finishing that repays a loupe for a long time.

The Size Question

The 1815 Up/Down has now existed in three diameters. It arrived at 35.9mm, grew to 39mm for the current production models, and this limited edition lands at 37.5mm, which is where a lot of people wanted it all along. Thickness stays at 8.7mm, so the proportions are excellent, and the dial layout survived the reduction with none of the Arabic numerals clipped by the subdials.

 

That last detail sounds minor and it separates a proper redesign from a photographic reduction. Shrinking a dial means redrawing the numerals, the railroad minute track and the subdial diameters so everything still breathes. Lange did the work.

 

The dial itself is solid silver with a blue finish, and the two subdials are left in contrasting metallic snailing, which gives the face more depth than the previous versions had. Hands are gold on the main display and heat-blued steel on the subdials. Water resistance is 30 metres, which is what a gold dress watch on an alligator strap should be.

Source: Hodinkee.com

My Reservations

Collectors will compare this immediately to the first-generation blue dial from the 35.9mm era, reference 221.027, which has become one of the more sought-after 1815s. The new blue is duller and dustier where the old one was a deep navy. Whether that reads as more grown-up or simply less striking will come down to taste, and photographs will not settle it for you.

 

There is also the word limited. Six hundred watches across the two metals is a substantial run by Lange standards, so anyone buying on scarcity should think again. The premium over standard production is real, and the standard 39mm model is available, unnumbered, at less money.

 

What you are paying extra for is the case size and the dial, and if the 37.5mm is what kept you from buying a 1815 Up/Down until now, that is a perfectly good reason to spend the difference. Lange has been shrinking watches across its catalogue for a few years, so the 37.5mm case may not stay limited forever, and I would not buy this one on the assumption that it will.