Ferdinand Adolph Lange

Raised by foster parents after his parents separated, Lange went to the technical school in Dresden and trained alongside it with the watchmaker Johann Christian Friedrich Gutkaes, later court watchmaker to the King of Saxony.^1, 3

In 1837 he set out on his journeyman’s travels through France, England and Switzerland. Near Paris he was foreman in the workshop of the Austrian-born watchmaker Joseph Thaddäus Winnerl while studying astronomy and physics at the Sorbonne.^1, 3, 8

Back in Dresden around 1841, he married Gutkaes’s daughter Antonia in 1842 and became a partner in his father-in-law’s business.^1, 3

Glashütte had lived from silver mining, and when the mines gave out its families fell back on straw plaiting and thin upland farming. In the early 1840s the Saxon government was looking for people to build new industries in the Ore Mountains.^1, 2

From 1843 Lange wrote to the government again and again with a costed plan for watchmaking in Glashütte. In 1845 the Ministry of the Interior agreed to a repayable loan for training fifteen apprentices, and he moved to the town.^1, 2, 3

The start was slow. Teaching young people from the region took longer than he had planned, and he put everything he owned into the workshop and borrowed heavily to keep it going.¹

He pushed skilled workers to set up firms of their own and drew other watchmakers to the town, among them Moritz Grossmann. That is how one workshop became an industry.^2, 3

Instead of one craftsman making a whole watch, Lange split production into specialised steps, and built new tools and measuring instruments to go with them.^1, 3

Both his own firm and Glashütte Original say he moved his workshop from the old Paris line to the metric system decades before Germany required it.^1, 11

He spent nearly twenty years refining a single upper plate that held the pivots of the main wheels; by 1864 it covered three quarters of the movement. From the 1850s he also used German silver for some movement frames. Both became hallmarks of the Glashütte tradition.^12, 13

Lange was mayor of Glashütte from 1848 for about eighteen years and later sat in the Saxon state parliament. The town made him a freeman and set up a pension fund for watchmakers in his name.^1, 3

His son Richard became a partner in 1868, when the firm took the name A. Lange & Söhne. After Lange’s death in 1875, Richard and his brother Emil ran it.^3, 15