Lange was founded in 1845 by Ferdinand Adolph Lange in the little town of Glashütte, near Dresden in the state of Saxony. In 1948, the post-war Soviet administration expropriated the company's property, and the Lange brand ceased to exist. But in 1990, after the collapse of the East German communist government, Adolph Lange's great-grandson, Walter Lange, restored the company with help from a family of Swiss watch manufacturers including IWC. Now A. Lange & Söhne (litt. A. Lange & Sons), like IWC, belongs to the Richemont group of companies.
More recently, on March 15, 2007, the company unveiled the culmination of a multi-year effort to produce the first wearable mechanical watch with a 31-day power reserve: that is, a watch that need be wound only once per month (with a special key). To guarantee the power reserve for a month, the brand's watchmakers used two stacked mainspring barrels that store the required energy. The big-sized barrels made it necessary to apply two mainsprings that are 5-10 times longer than those found in other wristwatch movements. At this point, Lange specialists faced a serious problem - a common winding crown train was not suitable for winding such strong mainsprings. To solve that problem, the watchmakers used the 'key technology' of A. Lange & Söhne pocket watches. Some Lange admirers lauded these technological achievements, while others expressed skepticism that there would be a significant market for this very large (46 mm wide by 16 mm deep) and expensive (almost $180,000) platinum-cased watch. In 2009, the Lange 31 was released in Rose Gold.
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