FROM SCRATCH

On paper A. Lange & Söhne may seem to have more than 150 years of history but in reality, that number is probably closer to 30 and what they have achieved in that time is just incredible.

- DANIEL GOH

There is an opera house in Dresden, Germany called the Semperoper. And in it, there is a massive clock that displays the time in five-minute intervals, through two large windows with a digital display - Roman numerals for the hours and Arabic numerals for the minutes. This method of time indication, however modern it may seem, was actually devised back in the late 1830s, made by the master watchmaker, Johann Christian Friedrich Gutkaes.

It was in a little room behind this gigantic clock that I found myself on a beautiful summer day, admiring the mechanical structure that spun the wheels as time elapsed. The genesis of the clock, as I am told, was to stop guests of the opera house from opening and closing their pocket watches which generated an audible click that would distract the others in the audience. Thus, with a massive clock overhead, one only needs to look up to know the time. These days the timekeeping is managed electronically but they have engineered a mechanism that still utilises a clever system of gears and weights to keep the analogue spirit of this clock alive.

In fact, much of Dresden is like this clock. With the city, along with its historic architecture, razed to the ground following a bombing raid during the final throes of the Second World War, it too had to be rebuilt. And naturally with advancements in technology since the city was first built by the past Kings of Saxony, the façade remains baroque but its re-construction and subsequent upkeep employs modern construction methods.