Glashütte Original

stromer
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Some great Easter holiday at Dresden and Glashütte - Part II

Time now to take a stroll over to the Watch Museum, …


...passing by the well known neighbors, …





… visiting the cosy little NOMOS shop in the house where Ferdinand A. Langefounded the Glashütte watch industry in 1845, …


… and taking a break in one of Glashüttes bakeries.


I cannot help but break the best known forum rule now by discussing pricing: Being offered a piece of cream cake for 90ct (EUR) is a joyful experience that we have never made before. (Here in Munich you would be have to spend three times as much.) And it was really tasty!


Here we are. At least I managed to get here before the museum will celebrate its first birthday.I was really curios what exactly to find inside and we were not disappointed. The way they display the Glashütte watch making history is really entertaining and informative at the same time. It is really worth seeing.


For those who might (like I did) wonder where the dial design of the Senator Chronometer comes from, I put together a little collection of historic Glashütte marine chronometers that I found distributed throughout the museum.


And even this gentleman at the demonstration workshop inside the museum seems to be repairing the gimbal of a marine chronometer.

We have been talking about and admiring some Navigators in the recent past in the forum.So here for all the fans:


The A. Lange airman frombetween 1941 and 1945.


The same watch with a special dial version for the SS. A very dark spot in German history.


The Airman chronograph.


What a great inside (insight)!


And finally for the Airman with the Golden Gun. Oops, this one is not from the museum but from the window a Dresden dealership. Not really my cup of tea, a golden Airman …


Although Glashütte was part of the GDR during the cold war, Glashütte watches were also offered in Western Germany. The museum displays does not fail to display this part of history also.


Here is an excerpt of the 1966 catalogue of a well known West German mail order department store. 40 Deutsche Mark! What a joke! I will take 10 of them!
We learned during the guided tour at the manufacture that it were the West German mail order shops that prevented the VEB GUB from stopping the production of mechanical watches when quartz movements came up. As the only customers they continued to order and sell mechanical watches from Glashütte (under the names of Glashütte and "Meister Anker".)


I would like to get one of these for our kitchen. Very clean design.


After out visit in the museum I returned to the G.O. manufacture to meet "Our man at Glashütte" René Marx. He received me in an extremely cordial way and spent almost two hours chatting with me and answering all my questions. Thank you very much, Mr. Marx!

Before leaving Glashütte I wanted to catch a glance at another important station during the genesis of a Senator Chronometer:


The observatory housing the German chronometer test center. Is it not a beautiful evening?


If you ever wondered why it is called the Urania-Observatory, here is the reason:It was built by the watch maker student fellowship "Urania" that was founded in 1879, one year after the watch making school.


The test people do not make it easy to take a picture of their name plate…


…but I found a way.


Did I mention that it was a beautiful day? Obviously a little too beautiful for the little chocolate cakes presented to us by our hotel in Dresden ;-)


So the sun is setting after a most pleasant and rich day at Glashütte.

The next day we returned home and took the chance to stop by at another Saxon technical masterpiece: the railway bridge over the valley of the Göltzsch (do not try to pronounce it, you will hurt your tongue).


Its construction was started one year after F. A. Lange founded the Glashütte watch industry and 11 years after the first German railway had been inaugurated .


It is more than 574m long, 78m high and consists of more than 26 millions of bricks.


Given how important exact timekeeping was for the emerging railway traffic, isn't this a fitting end point for a journey to Glashütte watch present and past?

Thank you very much for arriving here!

Best regards and read you!
Martin