The watch industry is awash with too much news to cover. Each week, we’ll break down everything worth knowing. This week: A.Lange & Söhne’s new limited edition, Farer’s first automatic and the continuing decline of the Swiss watch industry.
A. Lange & Söhne’s New Timepiece
A. Lange & Söhne‘s latest model is the Richard Lange Pour le Mérite, a 218-piece limited-run watch featuring a 41 x 10.5mm white gold case, a silver dial finished in black, and the watchmaker’s caliber L044.1 movement. The L044.1 may be time-only (which makes the $80,000+ MSRP a bit hair-raising), but it features plenty of Lange’s signature finishing and details, including a hand-engraved balance cock, gold chatons and a rare mechanism called a “fusée-and-chain”; essentially, as a mainspring becomes unwound and loses force, the fusée-and-chain acts as an infinitely variable transmission that feeds a constant amount of force from the mainspring to the rest of the movement, increasing accuracy.
Rise of the Machines
MB&F has just released its latest “Horological Machine.” The MB8 is inspired by the Can-AM racing series of the ’60, ’70s and ’80s, and the overall architecture is meant to mimic open-top racers of the series. The time-telling mechanism is a disc-and-prism setup: the hour and minutes are displayed on rotating discs projected upwards to the wearer with two prisms.
