The Lange Family History

This fascinating journey started in Saxony, and its capital Dresden, which was a center of European culture, renowned for its technicians, inventors, art collections, and monumental architecture. Elector Frederick Augustus I (called Augustus the Strong) was a staunch booster of scientific measuring, outstanding craftsmanship, and especially clocks. Two generations of the Saxon Court Clockmaker’s Guild led to the genesis of the Lange watchmaking family tree.

Patriarch Ferdinand Adolph Lange – preferring to be called Adolph – began his life with a most unfortunate family situation and a dubious future. He was born in Dresden on February 18, 1815, to an uncouth gunsmith, Samuel Lange, who physically abused his wife until she ran from him when Adolph was a small child. The lad was frail but quite intelligent, and was given over to foster parents who raised him. Recognizing his potential, they apprenticed him as a fifteen-year-old teenager to the most famous clockmaker to the royal Saxon court, Johann Christian Friedrich Gutkaes. From this master, Adolph, learned that the most important innovations in timekeeping were being developed in France and England. He studied the languages of both countries in night classes at the Dresden technical college, enabling him to take an assistantship in Paris with renowned watchmaker, Josef Thaddäus Winnerl, who had been the brightest student of Abraham-Louis Breguet. Adolph earned the grade of werkemeister in three years and then returned to Dresden and married his mentor’s daughter, Charlotte Gutkaes in 1842. He soon became the partner and principal force in his father-in-law’s workshop.

Adolph was a brilliant visionary, and hadn’t been satisfied with French technology; there was too much trial and error, lacking consistent quality. He had also visited Switzerland and England, where he learned metric conversions and higher standards; he initiated his "Glashütte Project," named after his town in Saxony that was the center of German watchmaking. He mated the Swiss cylinder watch with the more durable and precise English lever movement, an important but relatively expensive innovation that made German watchmaking leap ahead. He opened his own workshop on December 7, 1845, calling it a "manufactory." In an act of entrepreneurial charity, he reinvigorated the poverty-stricken Ore Mountain area South of Dresden by outsourcing the talents of their casemakers, gilders, and engravers for his watches, providing them with educations and jobs. Later, he also promoted them to three other studios, owned by people he had trained. For the next thirty years, Adolph grew his company and gained tremendous prominence in the Glashütte community of clock and watchmakers.

Adolph suddenly died of heart failure in 1875, at the age of 60. He had been mayor of Glashütte for 18 years; a black marble monument was erected to honor his long list of merits. He and Charlotte had two sons – Richard and Emil – both of whom had learned watchmaking from their father. In 1868, before his death, they had become the commercial and technical managers of the company, which Adolph named A. Lange & Sohne. After the United German Empire was formed in 1871, there was an economic boom. During the ensuing affluence, beautifully ornamented and complicated timepieces were in high demand, producing forty years of epic prosperity for the Lange manufactory. Eldest son, Richard, was a technological genius like his father, and spent his life in scientific Horology research, working into his dotage. He designed 27 patents and utility models, creating innovations such as his groundbreaking metal alloy watch balance spring, the first watchmaking company to make their own. Kaiser Wilhelm commissioned Richard’s crowning glory, one of the most magnificent pocket watches of the 19th century, in 1898. It was presented to the Ottoman Sultan during a state visit to Germany.

World War I destroyed the luxury watch market, but the company still survived, making precision marine chronometers for sailors and the German navy. Afterwards, the third generation of the Lange dynasty, brothers Gerhard, Otto, and Rudolf, assumed control of the company up to World War II, keeping alive their reputation for horology excellence. Walter Lange, Adolph’s great-grandson, was born on July 29, 1924, and of course, studied watchmaking until the war began. He was drafted into the army and was severely wounded, returning home in time to see his family’s manufactory nearly destroyed in an Allied bombing raid, just as the ensuing firestorms decimated most of nearby Dresden. The post-war Socialist government expropriated what was left. Escaping to the Western sector to avoid certain brutal labor under the Russians, Walter finally returned to Glashütte forty years later, in 1989, after the German reunification and the end of the Socialist regime.

Walter, the fourth generation of Lange horologists, reinitiated the family business for the second time on December 7, 1990 – exactly (to the day) 145 years after his great-grandfather founded it. Several years later, with a small group of new employees, he introduced a line of four, brilliant new wristwatches. They were immediately successful and created new jobs in Glashütte, reanimating the industry there and making it once again the center of precision German watchmaking, as it remains today.