Pocket Watches · Pocket watch
A. Lange & Söhne Anchor Chronometer pocket watch, c. 1910
- Maker / attribution
- Lange (maker)
- Date
- c. 1910
- Historical period
- Golden Age of Mechanical Watchmaking (1900 – 1945)
- Country of origin
- Unrecorded in source
- Object type
- Pocket watch
- Auction house
- LiveAuctioneers auction archive
- Lot
- Item 66359810
- Credit line
- Auction lot record: lot 49, Rare & Important Timepieces, John Moran Auctioneers, Inc. (2018), via LiveAuctioneers
- Catalogue title (original)
- A. Lange & Söhne Anchor Chronometer pocket watch (English)
View the source record (auction lot) ↗ (opens another website in a new tab)Suggest a correction
Record summary
Catalogued by LiveAuctioneers auction archive (lot Item 66359810), this is a pocket watch by Lange, dated c. 1910. The Atlas places it in the Golden Age of Mechanical Watchmaking period (1900 – 1945) of its Pocket Watches collection. The record is illustrated with 4 photographs.
Assembled from the source record's structured fields. Dates and attributions are given as the source states them; where a field is missing the Atlas leaves it blank rather than estimating.
Catalogue description
Lot description — John Moran Auctioneers, Inc.
Circa 1910, Glashütte, Germany Dial: white porcelain double-sunken dial, black Arabic numerals, sub-seconds, outer minute track, gold Louis XV-style hands, signed: A. Lange & Söhne, Glashütte SA Movement: 16 jewel, #60762, stem-wind and lever-set movement, frosted gilt three-quarter plate movement, straight-line Glashütte lever escapement, gold escape wheel, Lange Guillaume balance, diamond endstone, screwed gold jeweled chatons, swan-neck micrometric regulator, blued steel Breguet balance-spring, signed: A. Lange & Söhne, Glashütte Dresden Case: 18K yellow gold smooth and chased Lucia-style hunter case, #60762, front cover with etched monogram, glazed movement bezel, hallmarked, polished hinged cuvette signed: 1885 13/III 1910 Steinkohlenbauverein Gottes Segen Zu Lugan 58mm Dia. 163 grams gross
Historical context
Golden Age of Mechanical Watchmaking (1900 – 1945)
The wristwatch displaces the pocket watch; waterproof cases, self-winding and grand complications.
The pocket watch reached technical maturity and then began to give way to the wristwatch after the First World War. Complicated watches for collectors such as Henry Graves Jr. and James Ward Packard, railroad watches, and slim Art Deco dress watches are characteristic.
Read the period in the timelineMore pocket watches from this periodEarlier: Industrial Revolution
Atlas type guide
Pocket chronometers and precision watches
A pocket chronometer is a watch built to observatory standards, traditionally with a detent escapement like a marine chronometer. English makers such as John Arnold and Thomas Earnshaw made the first pocket chronometers in the 1780s. In the nineteenth century the term increasingly referred to any watch that had passed official rating trials at observatories in Kew, Neuchâtel, Geneva or Besançon, and the Swiss lever chronometer became dominant.
Tourbillon and karrusel watches belong to the same world of precision. Breguet patented the tourbillon in 1801 to average out positional errors; Bahne Bonniksen's karrusel (1892) was a cheaper English alternative. Rating certificates (bulletins de marche) that accompany such watches are historical documents in their own right.
What to look for
- Detent escapement (no pallets; a fine spring detent locks the escape wheel).
- Observatory certificates, competition results or 'Chronometer' marking on the dial.
- Tourbillon carriage visible through an aperture or on the movement.
- Fine finishing: jewelled holes in gold chatons, diamond endstones.
Dating clues
- English pocket chronometers: c. 1780–1900.
- Observatory trials at Neuchâtel from 1866, Geneva from 1873, Kew from 1884.
- Karrusels: 1892–c. 1915.
General guidance written by the Atlas editors about this kind of object. It is not a statement about this particular piece; for that, rely on the source record above and on physical examination.
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