Description
There is exactly one wristwatch in series production that can split the hour counter, and A. Lange & Söhne has been making it since 2018. The Triple Split now arrives in 950 platinum with a rhodium-coloured dial, limited to 100 numbered pieces, having been shown at the Concours of Elegance at Hampton Court Palace in early September.
The proposition is unchanged and still without a competitor. A conventional rattrapante splits seconds, which lets you time two events that finish within a minute of one another. The Triple Split splits seconds, minutes and hours, extending comparative timing to twelve hours. It is a complication with a genuinely narrow use case and no substitute whatsoever.
Design
The case measures 43.2 mm × 15.6 mm in 950 platinum, alternating polished and satin-brushed surfaces, with a sapphire display back. Platinum's density gives the watch a heft that suits its scale — this has never been a discreet object, and the metal stops it pretending otherwise.
The dial is solid 925 silver finished in a rhodium colour, with grey auxiliary registers that separate the counters cleanly from the main surface, a tachymeter scale around the periphery, luminous hour markers and hands, and blued steel hands for the rattrapante indications — the traditional Lange cue that tells you at a glance which hand is the split. It runs on a dark-brown hand-stitched alligator strap with grey stitching and a platinum quick-release deployant buckle.
Specifications
- Reference: 424.025F
- Case diameter: 43.2 mm
- Case thickness: 15.6 mm
- Case material: 950 platinum, polished and satin-brushed
- Crystal: Sapphire
- Caseback: Sapphire display
- Water resistance: 3 bar
- Dial: Solid 925 silver, rhodium-coloured with grey auxiliary dials, tachymeter scale
- Movement: Calibre L132.1, manually wound, in-house
- Components: 567
- Jewels: 46
- Frequency: 21,600 vph (3 Hz)
- Power reserve: 55 hours
- Complications: Triple rattrapante flyback chronograph to 12 hours, jumping minute counters, continuous hour counters, UP/DOWN power reserve
- Finishing: Hand-engraved balance cock, untreated German silver plates
- Strap: Dark-brown hand-stitched alligator, platinum deployant buckle
- Limited edition: 100 numbered pieces
- Price: EUR 210,000
What's Exciting
Eight years after its launch, nobody has built a rival. That is unusual in modern watchmaking, where a genuinely new complication is typically answered within a few seasons. The reason is that splitting the hour counter is disproportionately hard: each additional split hand needs its own isolator and clamp, and every one of those adds friction the mainspring has to overcome without disturbing the rate. Lange holds 55 hours at 3 Hz while carrying three of them.
What makes the platinum edition worth the premium over the white gold and pink gold predecessors is less the metal than the dial. The rhodium-coloured silver with grey registers is the most legible the Triple Split has looked — and on a watch whose entire purpose is reading two elapsed times at once, legibility is not a cosmetic concern.
History
Lange's split-seconds lineage runs back to the Double Split of 2004, itself the first wristwatch able to split the minute counter and already, at the time, a complication without precedent. The Triple Split of 2018 extended the same logic to the hours, completing the set. Both descend from the Datograph of 1999, the watch that established modern Lange as a chronograph house and which many still consider the finest integrated chronograph movement of its era.
The firm's own history is older and more interrupted than the modern collection suggests: founded in Glashütte in 1845 by Ferdinand Adolph Lange, expropriated under East German rule after 1948, and revived only in 1990 by his great-grandson Walter Lange with the first modern collection arriving in 1994. The untreated German silver plates and hand-engraved balance cock in this movement are direct inheritances from that pre-war Saxon tradition.
