The Glashütte tradition

What made Glashütte’s watches distinct began as a way of organising work. Ferdinand Adolph Lange split production into specialised steps instead of having one craftsman make a whole watch, and urged skilled workers to found firms of their own. Other watchmakers settled in the town, among them Moritz Grossmann, and makers of tools and fine-mechanical parts grew up beside them.^{6, 7, 8, 9}

From 1878 the Deutsche Uhrmacherschule, opened on Grossmann’s initiative, trained the town’s watchmakers. Its watches became known well enough to be copied: imitations were sold as “System Glashütte”, and in the 1920s an “Original Glashütte” seal set the genuine ones apart.^{8, 9, 11, 12}

Most pocket watches of the time held each wheel under its own bridge or cock, and lining them up against one another was slow trial and error. Lange replaced them with one upper plate holding the pivots of the main wheels, so their positions were fixed. He refined it for nearly twenty years until, in 1864, it covered three quarters of the movement with the balance left uncovered.^1, 2

The plate makes a movement steadier and keeps dirt out, but fitting it over several arbors at once takes a steady hand. Quill & Pad calls it practically a synonym for Glashütte watchmaking. A two-thirds plate came before it, and Moritz Grossmann still uses one.^{1, 2, 4, 13}

The plates and bridges are traditionally German silver, an alloy of copper, nickel and zinc that Lange began using for some movement frames in the 1850s in place of gilded brass or hardened steel. It is harder than brass, resists tarnishing and needs no gilding, slowly taking on a light patina.^1, 3

The plate usually carries Glashütte ribbing, a wave pattern related to the Swiss côtes de Genève but laid at a different angle. The jewel bearings sit in polished gold settings, or chatons, each held by thermally blued screws.^1, 2, 4

The balance cock, the small bridge over the balance, is engraved by hand with a floral pattern, so no two are alike. Other recurring details are the swan-neck fine adjustment for regulating the rate, the screw balance, and a power-reserve display marked “Auf” and “Ab”, up and down.^2, 4

Ideas from Glashütte

In 1930 Richard Lange, the founder’s son, patented a balance-spring alloy containing beryllium, an idea later marketed by others as the Nivarox spring. Glashütte Original says the flying tourbillon, held from one side only, came from the teacher Alfred Helwig and his students at the watchmaking school in 1920.^{4, 12, 14}

The tradition survived the war in reduced form. The wristwatch movement the town designed in October 1945, after its factories were dismantled, kept the layout of a three-quarter plate, pressed from thin sheet metal; through the East German years the town’s watches were made by the state company GUB.¹²

After reunification the old hallmarks came back. A. Lange & Söhne reintroduced the three-quarter plate after 1990, and most modern Glashütte movements are built around one, above all at Lange and Glashütte Original.^1, 13