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Ludwig Blattner (1881 – 30 October 1935) was a German-born inventor, film producer, director and studio owner in the United Kingdom, and developer of one of the earliest magnetic
sound recording
Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical, mechanical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording ...
devices.
Career
Ludwig Blattner, also known as Louis Blattner, was a pioneer of early magnetic sound recording, licensing a steel wire-based design from German inventor Dr. Kurt Stille, and enhancing it to use steel tape instead of wire, thereby creating an early form of
tape recorder
An audio tape recorder, also known as a tape deck, tape player or tape machine or simply a tape recorder, is a sound recording and reproduction device that records and plays back sounds usually using magnetic tape for storage. In its present ...
. This device was marketed as the Blattnerphone. Whilst on a promotional tour of his sound recording technology in 1928 he would choose ladies from the audience to dance with to music being played from a Blattnerphone.
![Pola Negri Grand Souvenir March by Ludwig Blattner](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Pola_Negri_Grand_Souvenir_March_by_Ludwig_Blattner.jpg)
Prior to the First World War, Blattner was involved in the entertainment industry in the
Liverpool City Region
The Liverpool City Region is a combined authority region of England, centred on Liverpool, incorporating the local authority district boroughs of Halton, Knowsley, Sefton, St Helens, and Wirral. The region is in the historic counties of ...
: he managed the "La Scala" cinema in
Wallasey from 1912 to 1914, conducted the cinema's orchestra, and composed a waltz "The Ladies of Wallasey". In about 1920 he moved to Manchester where he managed a chain of cinemas. There, in 1923 he composed and published a piece of music about the film actress
Pola Negri
Pola Negri (; born Apolonia Chalupec ; 3 January 1897 – 1 August 1987) was a Polish stage and film actress and singer. She achieved worldwide fame during the silent and golden eras of Hollywood and European film for her tragedienne and femm ...
titled "Pola Negri Grand Souvenir March". Later in the 1920s, he bought the British film rights to
Lion Feuchtwanger
Lion Feuchtwanger (; 7 July 1884 – 21 December 1958) was a German Jewish novelist and playwright. A prominent figure in the literary world of Weimar Germany, he influenced contemporaries including playwright Bertolt Brecht.
Feuchtwanger's J ...
's novel ''
Jew Süss'' although the film was not made until 1934 after Blattner had sold the rights to
Gaumont British
The Gaumont-British Picture Corporation produced and distributed films and operated a cinema chain in the United Kingdom. It was established as an offshoot of the Gaumont Film Company of France.
Film production
Gaumont-British was founded in 18 ...
. In early 1928, press reports appeared saying that Blattner was planning a 400-acre "Hollywood, England" complex with a hospital, 150 room hotel, aeroplane club and the largest collection of studios in the world, for which he was planning to spend between 2 million and 5 million pounds. Blattner later formed the Ludwig Blattner Picture Corporation in
Borehamwood
Borehamwood (, historically also Boreham Wood) is a town in southern Hertfordshire, England, from Charing Cross. Borehamwood has a population of 31,074, and is within the London commuter belt. The town's film and TV studios are commonly know ...
in the studio complex that is now known as
BBC Elstree Centre
The BBC Elstree Centre, sometimes referred to as the BBC Elstree Studios, is a television production facility, currently owned by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The complex is located between Eldon Avenue and Clarendon Road in Bore ...
, buying the
Ideal Film Company
The Ideal Film Company (often known as Ideal Films or simply Ideal) was a British film production and distribution company that operated between 1911 and 1934.
The company, based in Soho, London, was started by the two Jewish brothers Harry M ...
studio (formerly known as Neptune Studios) in 1928, renaming it as Blattner Studios. In 1928 his company produced a series of short films of musical performances such as "Albert Sandler and His Violin
erenade – Schubert and "Teddy Brown and His Xylophone". The best known films produced by his film company were ''
A Knight in London
''A Knight in London'' (german: Eine Nacht in London) is a 1928 British-German silent drama film directed by Lupu Pick and starring Lilian Harvey, Ivy Duke and Robin Irvine. It was one of a significant number of co-productions between the tw ...
'' (1929) and
My Lucky Star (1933), which was co-directed by Blattner. Films produced by other companies at the Blattner Studios included
Dorothy Gish
Dorothy Elizabeth Gish (March 11, 1898June 4, 1968) was an American actress of the screen and stage, as well as a director and writer. Dorothy and her older sister Lillian Gish were major movie stars of the silent era. Dorothy also had great s ...
and
Charles Laughton's first drama talkie ''
Wolves
The wolf (''Canis lupus''; : wolves), also known as the gray wolf or grey wolf, is a large canine native to Eurasia and North America. More than thirty subspecies of ''Canis lupus'' have been recognized, and gray wolves, as popularly un ...
'' (1930),
the
1934 adaptation of
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (; Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is wid ...
's short story "
The Tell-Tale Heart
"The Tell-Tale Heart" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1843. It is related by an unnamed narrator who endeavors to convince the reader of the narrator's sanity while simultaneously describing a murder the n ...
",
''
Rookery Nook'' (1930) and ''
A Lucky Sweep
''A Lucky Sweep'' is a 1932 British comedy film directed by A. V. Bramble and starring John Longden, Diana Beaumont and A. G. Poulton. It was made at Elstree Studios as a quota quickie.Chibnall p.264
Cast
* John Longden as Bill Higgins
* Dian ...
'' (1932).
Ludwig Blattner was also involved in an early colour motion picture process: in about 1929 he bought the rights for the use outside the USA of a lenticular colour process called
Keller-Dorian cinematography
Keller-Dorian cinematography was a French technique from the 1920s for filming movies in color, using a lenticular process to separate red, green and blue colors and record them on a single frame of black-and-white film. Keller-Dorian was prima ...
. This process was then known as the Blattner Keller-Dorian process, which lost out to rival colour systems.
Ludwig Blattner originally intended the Blattnerphone to be used as a system of recording and playback for talking pictures, but the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
saw its potential to record and "timeshift" BBC radio programmes for use with the
BBC Empire Service #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board ex ...
, and rented several Blattnerphones from 1930 onwards, one of which was used to record King George V's speech at the opening of the India Round Table Conference on 12 November 1930. The 1932 BBC Year Book (covering November 1930 to October 1931) said: In 1939, the BBC used a Blattnerphone (not the later Marconi-Stille recorder) to record Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain's announcement to Britain of the outbreak of
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
.
In 1930, Blattner promoted a version of his Blattnerphone technology as one of the first telephone
answering machine
An answering machine, answerphone or message machine, also known as telephone messaging machine (or TAM) in the United Kingdom, UK and some Commonwealth countries, ansaphone or ansafone (from a trade name), or telephone answering device (TAD), ...
s, and in 1931 Blatter promoted a version of the Blattnerphone as the Blattner Book Reader, an early
Audiobook
An audiobook (or a talking book) is a recording of a book or other work being read out loud. A reading of the complete text is described as "unabridged", while readings of shorter versions are abridgements.
Spoken audio has been available in sc ...
playback system for the blind.
Despite being a "promoter of genius with far-seeing ideas about technical developments in sound and colour" according to the film director
Michael Powell
Michael Latham Powell (30 September 1905 – 19 February 1990) was an English filmmaker, celebrated for his partnership with Emeric Pressburger. Through their production company The Archers, they together wrote, produced and directed a seri ...
, business problems with the studio, due to the advent of rival talking picture systems, led to heavy financial loss, and in 1934
Joe Rock
Joe Rock (born Joseph Simberg, December 25, 1893 – December 5, 1984) was an American film producer, director, actor,Obituary '' Variety'', December 12, 1984, page 63. and screenwriter. He produced a series of 12 two reel short subject comedies ...
leased Elstree Studios from Ludwig Blattner, and bought it outright in 1936, a year after Blattner's suicide.
Personal life
Of German origin, Blattner emigrated to Great Britain in 1897 aged 16 with Gustav Mellin, a fellow German emigrant. He had two British-born children,
Gerry Blattner (born 1913 in
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. With a population of in 2019, it is the 10th largest English district by population and its metropolitan area is the fifth largest in the United Kingdom, with a populat ...
), and Betty Blattner (born in 1914 in Cheshire). They both followed their father into the film business, Gerry as a producer and Betty as a makeup artist. Ludwig Blattner never became a British citizen, and during the First World War he remained in an
internment camp, which interrupted his management of the Gaiety cinema in Wallasey. He married Else (also known as Elisabeth), the widow of
Edmund Meisel
Edmund Meisel (14 August 1894 – 14 November 1930) was an Austrian-born composer. He wrote the score to Walter Ruttmann's '' Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis'' (1927), ''The Battleship Potemkin'' (1925), and other films of Sergei Eisenstein. Meis ...
the composer of the score for ''
Battleship Potemkin
'' Battleship Potemkin'' (russian: Бронено́сец «Потёмкин», ''Bronenosets Potyomkin''), sometimes rendered as ''Battleship Potyomkin'', is a 1925 Soviet silent
drama film produced by Mosfilm. Directed and co-written by S ...
'', some time after Meisel's death in 1930, therefore Else was not the mother of Ludwig's children born in 1913 and 1914.
Ludwig hanged himself at the Elstree Country Club in October 1935, when his son was 22 and his daughter was 21. Ludwig and Gerry were honoured by the naming of Blattner Close in Elstree in the mid-1990s.
References
External links
Blattnerphone at the BBC's A History of the World*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Blattner, Ludwig
British film producers
Audio engineering
German emigrants to the United Kingdom
19th-century German Jews
20th-century German inventors
1881 births
Suicides by hanging in England
1935 suicides