Timothé Raguin

Timothé Raguin is a French watchmaker who trained at the Lycée Polyvalent Edgar Faure in Morteau. In 2017 he was selected as one of eight participants — alongside entrants from the USA, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands — for the F. A. Lange Watchmaking Excellence Award, which began with a week of intensive training at A. Lange & Söhne's factory in Glashütte before sending each participant home with six months to independently design and build a regulator watch from scratch, judged on originality, technical functionality, craftsmanship, and aesthetics.

Raguin's entry paired a traditional regulator layout — hours, minutes, and a 24-hour display arranged in small sub-dials along the gear train — with an independent jumping-seconds complication built around its own dedicated escapement: a constant seconds at nine o'clock and a deadbeat seconds at twelve, linked to the escape wheel via a separate dial-side escapement and tri-lobe activating cam visible through an opening in the mainplate. The conventional time display occupies only about a third of the dial, with the rest given over to the jumping-seconds mechanism and its hand-engraved sub-dial rings and polished, barrel-shaped escapement cock. The complication happened to be a personal favourite of A. Lange & Söhne founder Walter Lange, later echoed in the brand's own 1815 'Homage to Walter Lange' limited edition.

A jury that included Lange's director of product development, Anthony de Haas, journalists Gisbert L. Brunner and Peter Braun, and Dr Peter Plaßmeyer, director of Dresden's Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon, unanimously awarded Raguin first prize and €10,000 at a press event during SIHH Geneva on 16 January 2018, judging his work 'well above average' in both technique and craftsmanship ahead of runners-up Veit Rothaupt of Glashütte and Vesa Kulkki of Espoo, Finland. At the same event, Lange CEO Wilhelm Schmid announced that the award would be renamed the Walter Lange Watchmaking Excellence Award, in honour of the company's founder, who had died the previous year and remained deeply invested in the training of young watchmakers. Since the award, Raguin has developed a wristwatch tourbillon of his own, documenting its construction step by step on Instagram — from early renderings of a delicately curved tourbillon bridge and curved-spoke wheels, through machining the mainplate and testing the freedom of the wheels and tourbillon carriage, to a running but unfinished movement and, finally, a completed watch and dial.