The Limited Edition 1815 Tourbillon by A. Lange & Sohne

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Launched in 2014, the A. Lange & Söhne 1815 Tourbillon featured a then unheard of horological achievement, the premier of a hacking or stop-seconds mechanism for the tourbillon with a zero-reset time setting feature for precision time synchronisation. The patented mechanisms of the 1815 tourbillon allowed the watch to be stopped and then set with one-second accuracy. Now, the groundbreaking calibre returns in a special edition A. Lange & Söhne 1815 Tourbillon with white enamel dial, limited to 100 pieces.

The 100 piece limited edition A. Lange & Söhne 1815 Tourbillon with white enamel dial contrasts the large high complication stop-seconds tourbillon with zero reset visible through the aperture at 6 o’clock with the illusionary simplicity of an understated white enamel dial. “Grand feu”, or large fire, is a descriptive term of the oven-baked enameling process, each taking at least five hours to create a simple enamel dial.

More art than science, 30 manual processes are required to craft each dial. Furthermore, the white enamel dials such as the one used in this limited edition 1815 Tourbillon are especially problematic because of blemishes and bubbles resulting from a myriad of environmental factors, often, as many as 3 out of 4 dials have to be discarded because of imperfections.

The one-minute tourbillon of the special edition 1815 suspended beneath a black polished bridge, is a refined construct from the Saxony manufacture’s early history – the filigreed complication re-introduces the innovation first seen in 1997 with the Langematik – a zero-rest mechanism which assures accuracy when stopping and setting the timepiece.

The slavishly finished manufacture calibre L102.1, as one can expect from Saxony, is exhibited through the sapphire-crystal caseback, where a single diamond endstone in a screwed gold chaton on the fourth-wheel bridge takes prime focus on an exquisitely hand-decorated movement .

The 39.5-millimetre platinum A. Lange & Söhne 1815 Tourbillon with white enamel dial consecutively numbered from 001/100 to 100/100. The limited edition 1815 takes special care with historic authenticity reminiscent of vintage nineteenth- and twentieth-century pocket watch details such as the separately printed and red-fired number 12, blued-steel hands, Arabic numerals and a railway-track minute scale.

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