Walter Lange (1924-2017) is undoubtedly one of the most important figures of modern watchmaking. Great grandson of Ferdinand Adolph Lange, the founder of the company in 1845, Walter Lange, along with another genius of his time Günter Blümlein brought back German watchmaking with a bang in 1994 with the rebirth of A. Lange & Söhne.

A. Lange & Söhne immediately obtained critical and commercial success, connoisseurs lauding the elegant designs and complex movements. A certain number of the brand’s timepieces have reached iconic status in just a few short years: Lange 1, Pour le Merite Tourbillon, Datograph and more recently the Zeitwerk to name just a few.

The passing of Walter Lange early 2017 was not only a huge loss for the industry and the company but even more for the men and women who had been working with him throughout the years. The teams decided to pay homage to this great man by creating a timepiece that he had been thinking about for quite some time, a watch that was originally conceived by his great-grandfather and granted one of Germany’s first patents in 1877: a timepiece with independently stoppable jumping center seconds and separate seconds subdial.