C. Lorenz AG

C. Lorenz AG (1880-1958) was a German electrical and electronics firm primarily located in Berlin. It innovated, developed and marketed products for electric lighting, telegraphy, telephony, radar, and radio. It was acquired by ITT in 1930, and became part of the newly founded company Standard Elektrik Lorenz (SEL) in 1958.

Around 1870, Carl Lorenz (1844-1889) opened a shop in Berlin to manufacture electrical lighting products. The shop entered the telegraph field in 1880, taking the name C. Lorenz Telegraphenbauanstalt. Following the death of Carl Lorenz, the firm was acquired in 1890 by textile businessman Robert Held (1862-1924). Held retained the firm's original name and Carl's brother, Alfred Lorenz, was made the technical director. Under Held, the firm became a major supplier of telegraph and signaling equipment for the National Railroad. Held then expanded into the telephone market in 1893, buying Lewart and through this acquisition gaining a telephone-supplier position with the Postal Service. Typewriters were added as products in 1898, and, around the turn of the century, operating branches were added in several cities. In 1906, the firm registered for public trading as C. Lorenz AG (hereafter "Lorenz").

At the start of World War I, Lorenz had grown to about 3,000 employees and was a major supplier to the German military of land-line telephone and telegraph equipment and had also entered the wireless field. For this expansion, a large factory was built in the Tempelhof district of Berlin, and by 1918, the headquarters and research operations also occupied this facility. When World War I ended, Lorenz greatly decreased in size and turned to producing home radios, broadcast transmitters, and aircraft communications sets. In 1919, Lorenz initiated radio broadcasting (transmitting voice and music) in Germany, and their first home receiver, the Liebhaber-Empfänger, was introduced in 1923. Throughout the 1920s, radios and associated valves (vacuum tubes), were major products manufactured by Lorenz. In this, the firm was a primary competitor of Telefunken.

After Held's death, the controlling stock became available and was eventually bought in 1930 by Standard Elektrizitätsgesellschaft, a subsidiary of the American corporation International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT); Lorenz as a firm, however, continued to operate independently. In 1932, development of a new type of radio navigation system – soon known worldwide as the Lorenz beam – gave a major extension of their aircraft radio business. Lorenz patented the ferrite antenna in 1935, and thereafter it was used in most home receivers.

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