German gold open faced lever with seconde morte Circa 1917

Gold quality 1A pocket watch by A. Lange & Söhne
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A fine 18 carat gold open faced quality 1A lever Glashütte pocket watch with independent jumping seconds mechanism seconde morte, circa 1917. Sold in 1917 for the sum of 767 Marks. ¾ plate movement, lever escapement, applied seconde morte mechanism, gold screw compensation balance. White enamel dial with Arabic hours, outer minute divisions and sunk subsidiary seconds. Plain case, Royal design.
Dial signed, case numbered, movement signed and numbered, case and movement with matching numbers.
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Diameter: 53 mm
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Weight: 103 g
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Signed: A. Lange & Söhne Glashütte i/SA
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Ferdinand Adolph Lange was the founder of A. Lange & Söhne. He was born in 1815 as the son of Johann Samuel Lange. Early in life, his parents separated and he was adopted by a foster family. Luckily this family offered him a chance at proper education and in 1829, he joined the Technical University of Dresden. Lange’s master was Christian Friedrich Gutkaes, the maker of the famous five-minute clock in the Dresden Opera House and the court watchmaker later on. Lange finished his apprenticeship with honours and went on to work with Gutkaes as his assistant for more than two years. In 1837, Lange decided he wanted to learn the watchmaking craft from the best of the time and this decision took him to Paris, Switzerland and England. He spent four years with the master watchmaker Winnerl, a student of Breguet, in Paris. Lange returned to Dresden in 1841 and took over his now father-in-law Gutkaes’ business in 1842. He had the ambition to bring prosperity to the once rich, now unfortunate Erzgebirge region, Glashütte, he wanted to build a watchmaking industry and create jobs. He received funding from the high council of Saxony and on December 7th, 1845, Ferdinand Adolph Lange founded A. Lange & Cie. He started with fifteen young men who were obliged to work with him for at least five years and following Lange encouraged his apprentices to found their own specialized firms in Switzerland. He set up a watchmaking cluster in the region along with his colleagues Julius Assmann, Adolf Schneider and Moritz Grossmann. At the time, there was a specialist for every part, producing individual pieces of the highest quality. Ferdinand Adolph developed numerous mechanisms, from the remontoir to dead-seconds and repeaters and he introduced the metric system to watchmaking. Eventually, it took Glashütte watchmaking 20 years to develop. After two successful decades and as the mayor of Glashütte Ferdinand Adolph Lange retired in 1868. He enjoyed his spacious house built adjacent to the factory, which today serves as the headquarters of the modern A. Lange & Söhne. He gave the reigns of his legacy to his sons Richard and Emil Lange, subsequently, the company’s name was changed from A. Lange & Cie to A. Lange & Söhne. Under their management A. Lange & Söhne expanded tremendously. Ferdinand Adolph Lange died in 1875.
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The seconde morte, also known as dead-beat seconds, is a complication of a mechanical movement in which the second-hand moves every second. This is in contrast to the usual ‘running’ of the second hand. This complication is rare and was seen in the years before the quartz revolution, the 1970s and 1980s, but actually died a silent death because of the same quartz revolution. The reason for this was that the second-hand moves per second in almost the same way as quartz watches, which ultimately also use a frequency of 1Hz. With that, the ‘running’ second hand became the distinction between mechanical watches and quartz watches. Incidentally, that external similarity only applies to the second-hand jumping per second, the underlying mechanism of the dead seconds complication is of course of a completely different order.
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Jumping seconds mechanism or seconde morte. Lange felt that the readability of the jumping auxiliary seconds was not satisfactory in a pocket watch, so he started following another course. By 1867 he had designed a mechanism which allowed an independent large central seconds hand to jump every second. The hand had a stop device but could not be reset to zero. 1877 his sons filed a patent for a slightly modified version of A. Lange’s mechanism (No. 182). This seconds mechanism on a ¾ plate created a precision watch which had the indication system of an astronomical pendulum clock but was portable.