A. Lange & Söhne Tourbograph Perpetual Honeygold 706.050F

Tourbograph Perpetual Honeygold — 706.050F

Once in a while a watch comes along that stays with you. Part of it is the cerebral joy of counting its complications. The rest is how well it is designed and made. Despite everything it houses and the old principles it has to respect, the result is out of the ordinary, both for Lange and for watchmaking overall. When Lange introduced the 175th anniversary set in 2020, I thought it was among the best things the brand had ever done, and this is its crown jewel.

The Tourbograph’s story goes back to the Blümlein era. The plan was to launch a split-seconds tourbillon with fusée and chain on 24 October 1994, rather than the simpler Tourbillon Pour le Mérite that debuted that day. The project proved too ambitious for the timeline and was postponed. It arrived in 2005 as the Tourbograph Pour le Mérite, followed by a Honeygold edition of 50 pieces in 2010. As the Double Split and Triple Split show, Lange is not a brand that stops adding.

In 2016 came the Tourbograph Perpetual, which added a perpetual calendar to that movement and required the chronograph section to be reworked to new tolerances. Every function draws on one mainspring: the running chronograph, the split-seconds hand, and the calendar switching each midnight. The fusée and chain keeps the torque nearly constant, so the tourbillon keeps its rhythm whatever the rest of the movement demands. Calibre L133.1 has 684 parts.

Ref. 706.050FE is limited to 50 pieces and is the kind of watch that can turn non-watch friends into watch people. It comes in Honeygold with a black-rhodiumed Honeygold dial and a mix of hand styles that keeps the indications distinct. The dial is deep, with the tourbillon sitting roughly 1.5 mm below its surface, held by a curved black polished bridge with a diamond endstone.

Apart from the Grand Complication, this is Lange’s most ambitious traditional watch.