A chronograph is an instrument on which time can be started, stopped and reset. First created as standalone pieces, they would later find their way into wristwatches, together with the sign of the time.So what’s a split-seconds chronograph, or rattrapante in French? With the debut of racing (horses, cars, dog racing…), users discovered that a chronograph was great to time an whole race or a single lap, however incapable of time intermediate events such as laps. This is the point where the split seconds makes sense. Remember that most of the conventional complications were purpose-built (the moment repeater, for instance, was made as a way to consult the time at night…) The split-seconds chronograph enables time to be broken and may be used to time several laps of a race in a row, without losing track of the entire event.While that a chronograph is outfitted with one minutes hands, a rattrapante has two. When activated, both hands proceed concurrently. However, by pressing an extra-pusher, you can prevent among these, thus timing one part of the occasion, while the primary moments hand continues its route round the dial. By pressing on the pusher again, the subsidiary seconds hand will catch up with all the main hand hence the title rattrapante from the French rattraper — to grab. One issue though, this device only allows the timing of intermediate events of less than 60 seconds.In 2004, A. Lange & Söhne came out there with a stunning watch, both visually and automatically, the Double Split. In short, you’re now able to period several laps in a row, even for elapsed times up to half an hour. And if this is not enough, the Double Split also featured a flyback feature, meaning that the chronograph could be stopped, reset and started again “on the fly”, by simply pressing the pusher at 4 o’clock once.
For the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie (SIHH) in Geneva, A. Lange & Söhne built an exact copy of the highlight watch: The Triple Split is the first triple rattrapante watch that has ever been built. The giant copy is 50 times bigger than the original, but the chronographs movement is finished to the highest Lange standards as well.
