Highly Expensive Watches

List Price 2013

A. Lange & Söhne - Grand Complication ($2,49 Million)

A. Lange & Söhne are always producing spectacular watches and producing those watches in very limited quantities. The Grand Complication is a truly amazing piece of horology and only six of them will be made.

Different manufactures have different standards for what they will and will not call a grand complication, but this watch features a grande and petite sonnerie, minute repeater, split-seconds monopusher chronograph (with flyback seconds and a minutes register), and a perpetual calendar with moonphase indicator.

Technical details

Movement

• Lange manufacture calibre L1902, manually wound, crafted to the most exacting Lange quality standards, decorated and assembled by hand; precision-adjusted in five positions; plates and bridges made of untreated German silver; balance cock engraved by hand; chronograph levers black-polished
• Jewels: 67
• Screwed gold chatons: 7
• Escapement: Glashütte lever escapement, lever and escape wheel in 18- carat gold
• Oscillator: Shock-resistant screw balance, superior-quality balance spring manufactured in-house, frequency 18,000 semi- oscillations per hour, precision index tail adjustment system with lateral setscrew and whiplash spring
• Power reserve when fully wound: Going train: 30 hours; grand strike: 30 hours; small strike: 42 hours

Functions

• Time display with hours and minutes
• Chiming mechanism with grand and small strike
• Minute repeater
• Split-seconds chronograph with minute counter and jumping seconds
• Perpetual calendar with date, day of week, month in four-year cycle
• Moon phase

Operating elements

• Crown for winding the watch and setting the time
• One pusher each for operating the chronograph and the rattrapante mechanism
• Lever for activating and deactivating the chiming mechanism
• Lever for selecting small and grand strike
• Slide for actuating the minute repeater
• Correction push pieces for advancing the date, day of week, month, and moon phase

Case dimensions

• Diameter: 50.0 millimetres
• height: 20.3 millimetres

Movement dimensions

• Diameter: 40.5 millimetres
• Height: 14.2 millimetres

Case

• Pink gold
• Crystal and caseback: Sapphire crystal (hardness 9)

Dial

• Five-part enamel dial

Hands

• Pink gold; minute counter, rattrapante hand and jumping seconds hand blued steel

Strap

• Hand-stitched crocodile strap, red-brown

Buckle

• Lange deployant buckle in pink gold

With every complication here, A. Lange & Söhne has pushed it to the limits. Instead of just a minute repeater, there is a grande and petite sonnerie; instead of a chronograph, or even a split-seconds chronograph, there is a monopusher split-seconds chronograph accurate to 1/5th of a second; the perpetual calendar is accurate until year 2100 without adjustment and advances all the indicators (except the moonphase) at midnight. Another great timepiece from A.Lange & Söhne, this piece is 50 mm of pure perfection!