Ferdinand Adolph Lange

Ferdinand Adolph Lange trained partly under Gutkaes in Dresden and studied watchmaking techniques abroad before returning to Saxony, where in 1845 he founded a watchmaking workshop in the small town of Glashütte, with local government support intended to bring skilled employment to an economically depressed mining region. This founding is generally treated as the origin point of the Saxon (and, by extension, modern German) precision watch industry.

Lange trained a generation of local apprentices in precision watchmaking to a standard rivaling the best Swiss and English work, established shared component standards among Glashütte's small workshops (an early form of local standardisation akin in spirit to interchangeable-parts manufacturing elsewhere), and is credited with contributing to the three-quarter plate movement architecture and the use of gold chatons that became hallmarks of the Glashütte style.

The Lange firm (A. Lange & Söhne) continued under his sons after his death, was nationalised and effectively ceased production under East German state control after the Second World War, and was re-founded by Walter Lange, a descendant, after German reunification in 1990 — a well-documented and unusually dramatic company history that this encyclopedia notes in outline without extending founder-era biographical claims to the later, refounded company.