Teddy Baldassarre
Shining a Light on the A. Lange & Söhne Lumen Collection
When A. Lange & Söhne makes a contribution to watchmaking, whether in the areas of technology, design, materials, or any combination of these or other elements, it tends to go above and beyond the call - to challenge itself to reach a little higher, to put its own distinctly Saxon spin on things. This philosophy is evident particularly in the brand’s approach to complications: not just a moon-phase, but a moon-phase that’s accurate for more than a century. Not just a tourbillon, but the first tourbillon with a stop-seconds mechanism. Not just a split-seconds chronograph, but the first “triple split” chronograph to make comparative time measurements of not just seconds and minutes but multiple hours. It was in that overachieving spirit, no doubt, that Lange developed its own signature illumination system for watch dials, rolling it out in 2010 on the second generation of the groundbreaking Zeitwerk model that it had introduced the year prior. The system, called “Lumen” and patented in 2013, illuminates not only dial elements like hands and indexes in the dark but also components normally hidden beneath the dial’s surface, like date disks and decorated plates, wheels and bridges. Lange’s technical solution to the challenge of charging all of the elements uniformly - luminous-treated surface details like hands, hour markers and subdials, as well as non-treated parts beneath the surface - was a dial made of sapphire and coated with a semi-transparent ...
