10 Facts About Ludwig Blattner

Ludwig Blattner 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 devices.

Ludwig Blattner, 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.

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 Ludwig Blattner had sold the rights to Gaumont British.

In early 1928, press reports appeared saying that Ludwig 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.

Films produced by other companies at the Ludwig Blattner Studios included Dorothy Gish and Charles Laughton's first drama talkie Wolves, the 1934 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart", Rookery Nook and A Lucky Sweep.

Ludwig Blattner was 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.

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.

Ludwig Blattner appears to have returned later and worked for a while in the publicity department of Mellin's Food probably arranged through family contact with Gustav Mellin.

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 Blattner hanged himself at the Elstree Country Club in October 1935, when his son was 22 and his daughter was 21.