Ludwig Blattner

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. 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.

Prior to the First World war Blattner was involved in the entertainment industry in Liverpool, then in about 1920 he moved to Manchester where he managed a chain of cinemas. Later in the 1920s he bought the British film rights to Lion Feuchtwanger's novel Jew Suss although the film was not made until 1934 after Blattner sold on the rights to Gaumont British. Blattner formed the Ludwig Blattner Picture Corporation in Borehamwood in the late 1920s in the studio complex that is now known as Elstree Studios, buying the Ideal Film Company studio (formerly known as Neptune Studios) in Clarendon Road 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 [Serenade - Schubert]" and "Teddy Brown and His Xylophone". The best known films produced by his film company were A Knight in London in 1929 and My Lucky Star in 1933, whilst films produced by other companies at the Blattner Studios included Dorothy Gish and Charles Laughton's first drama talkie Wolves in 1930 and the 1934 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Tell-Tale Heart.

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. 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 saw its potential to record and "timeshift" BBC radio programmes for use with the BBC Empire Service, 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 some ways the most important event of the year has been the adoption by the B.B.C. of the Blattnerphone recording apparatus described in the Technical Section. For years the B.B.C 's programme officials have longed for a machine which would be useful on the one hand for recording outside events such as commentaries, speeches, etc., of which normally no record existed, and on the other for rehearsals, and in particular for enabling certain broadcasters to hear themselves as others hear them.

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.

In 1930 Blattner promoted a version of his Blattnerphone technology as one of the first telephone answering machines, and in 1931 Blatter promoted a version of the Blattnerphone as the Blattner Book Reader, an early Audiobook playback system for the blind.

Business problems with the studio, due to the advent of rival talking picture systems, lead to heavy financial loss, and in 1934 Joe Rock leased Elstree Studios from Ludwig Blattner, and bought it outright in 1936, a year after Blattner's suicide. After going through several more owners, the studio became the BBC Elstree Centre in 1984.

Personal life

Of German origin, Blattner moved to Great Britain in 1897 aged 16 and had two British-born children, Gerry Blattner born in 1913 in Liverpool, 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. Ludwig hanged himself at the Elstree Country Club in October 1935, and he and Gerry were honoured by the naming of Blattner Close in Elstree in the mid-1990s.