Sweet to the Beat

Mad science, massive heart and the new A. Lange & Söhne Richard Lange Jumping Seconds.

- Alvin Wong

You’ve heard this before, and it won’t be the last time that we – or any high-powered watch company CEO, for that matter – implore you to go check your mobile phone if you want to know exactly what time it is. It’s all there: tap, swipe, tap, and you can fire up the correct time, down to the second, for any time zone you want.

Of course, this begs the inevitable question: why bother with a mechanical watch at all, mired with its niggly, insurmountable inaccuracies? Or more specifically, for the purpose of this feature, why bother with the new A. Lange & Söhne Richard Lange Jumping Seconds?

The watch’s press communique proclaims that it is the result of “the quest for utmost precision”. Armed with a slew of mechanical innovations, which we will get to in a moment, the Richard Lange Jumping Seconds promises to tick in perfect, undulating precision, from the moment you wind it up, to the time it stops.

It’s all great. But for those who don’t know any better, this pursuit of precision, especially by watch brands tinkering with mechanical parts, appears to be a lost cause. After all, battery operated quartz watches are as accurate as they come. Likewise, pitted against processor chip- pumped mobile phones, even the best mechanical timepieces seem to be running in a race they can never win. Or can they?

HIGHER CALLING

“Sometimes you wonder about it, and sometimes it makes no sense,” admits Tino Bobe, A. Lange & Söhne’s director of manufacturing. The afroed technical whiz, who has been with the brand for over a decade, seems stumped for an answer.

“Maybe it’s because we love challenges,” he decides after some thought. “There will always be things in mechanical watchmaking that we can improve. At the end of the day, it is not a race against anybody else wbut ourselves.”