In a farm house laboratory abandoned by the occupying British army a month after the end of World War II, Professor Dr. Fritz Sennheiser founded his "Laboratorium Wennebostel" or Lab W. During the next 60 years, what became Sennheiser electronic GmbH & Co. KG grew into a world-leading manufacturer of microphones, headphones and wireless transmission systems with almost 2,000 employees and a bevy of engineering honors including an Emmy, a Grammy and a Scientific and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Fritz Sennheiser was born in the Karlshorst section of Berlin on May 9, 1912. As a young boy he loved plants, but the ravaged Weimar Republic economy was hardly conducive to a career in landscaping. Sennheiser instead pursued another boyhood interest, technology. At age 12, he built his own radio receiver from a slide coil and a crystal.
During his electrical engineering and telecommunications studies at Berlin's Technical University, Sennheiser went to work for the Heinrich Hertz Institute for Vibration Research, a Mecca for telecommunications research named for the man who discovered radio waves. Sennheiser also studied the technology of speech and music and, during his final exams, helped develop an electronic organ used at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In 1938, he followed one of his instructors to a new Institute for Radio Frequency Engineering and Electroacoustics at the University of Hanover and, in 1943, earned his doctorate.
Allied bombing, however, destroyed most of the Institute's research labs. Sennheiser located a former youth hostel in the small village of Wennebostel, just north of Hanover, and re-founded the Institute. At war's end on May 8, only seven of the 50 employees of the Institute remained, and a British communications unit took over. When the British occupation unit left a few weeks later, Sennheiser moved back into the abandoned farm house and founded his Lab W.
Lab W initially developed tube voltmeters for Siemens, and, one year later, started designing microphones following an urgent request from Siemens. In 1952, Lab W manufactured its first miniature magnetic headphone capsule, the HM 11, and the MD 21 microphone, which is still manufactured today. In 1954, Lab W unveiled the MD 81, the first modern shotgun microphone.
The company was renamed after its founder in 1958, a year after the company exhibited the first RF wireless microphone system, the Mikroport, for professional TV and stage use. In 1968, the company developed both the first open-back headphone, the HD 414, of which more than 10 million were sold, and the MK 12, the first professional RF wireless condenser clip-on microphone. In 1977, the company unveiled the world's first open electric headphones, the 2000.
On Sennheiser's 70th birthday in 1982, he handed the management of the company over to his son, Professor Dr. Jörg Sennheiser, who has continued to secure the company's success and is today chairman of the supervisory board. Sennheiser himself remained a consultant and limited partner. That year he was made an honorary member of the German Electrical Industry Association where he had been a board member for 16 years.
In 2002, Dr. Sennheiser was awarded the Gold Medal from the Audio Engineering Society in recognition of his lifetime contributions to the professional audio industry. The company still places great emphasis on its founder's philosophy to give engineers free rein in their creative ideas, no matter how crazy those ideas might seem, as it is often these ideas that result in the best developments.