George J. Schulmerich and the electro-mechanical bell.

Schulmerich was founded in 1935 in Philadelphia by George J. Schulmerich, an electrical engineer, to make an electro-mechanical carillon — an instrument in which small cast-bronze rods are struck and their sound is amplified, giving a church the sound of bells without a tower full of bronze. In 1943 the company expanded into a former shirt factory in Sellersville, Pennsylvania, where it stayed until 2014.

Its carillons competed directly with cast bells. Where Verdin, Paccard and Eijsbouts poured tonnes of bronze, Schulmerich offered the sound through rods and amplifiers — a lighter, cheaper route into a church tower, and the business Verdin later bought.

Then, after nearly three decades, came the handbells, the product the name is best known for today. In 1962 Schulmerich made “the first English handbells designed and manufactured in North America,” according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, which holds prototypes “made in Sellersville, Pennsylvania.” They were designed by its chief engineer, Jacob “Jake” Malta.

Malta later left. NPR’s Planet Money, in a December 2013 episode called “Bell Wars,” reported that after a change in management he founded a rival handbell maker, Malmark, whose bells, the programme said, have the tang cut off; a former Schulmerich sales representative likened the decades of rivalry that followed to “the Hatfields and McCoys.”

Bought in 2012, split in 2014.

In August 2012, after nearly eight decades of the company’s history, Jonathan Goldstein, a lawyer and private-equity investor from Narberth, Pennsylvania, “Purchased the assets of Schulmerich Carillons, Inc.,” according to his own biography. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in July 2013 that the company had 40 employees in seven single-storey former shirt-factory buildings. Goldstein, an outsider to the trade, told Planet Money: “I knew less than nothing. I can’t even read music.” We found no record of who owned the company before 2012, and we do not guess.

In March 2014 the business was divided, less than two years after Goldstein bought it. Goldstein’s biography says he “sold the company’s carillon business to its largest competitor, the I.T. Verdin Company,” and Schulmerich Carillons’ own site confirms that Verdin acquired it in 2014. In November 2014 the Sellersville site of more than nine acres was sold to a homebuilder, which built 54 townhomes, and the handbell business moved to Hatfield, Pennsylvania, as Schulmerich Bells, LLC. Goldstein’s 2024 biography still lists it as his company; we did not confirm its ownership in 2026.

So the name now belongs to two quite separate businesses: Schulmerich Bells, making handbells in Hatfield, and Schulmerich Carillons, owned by Verdin in Cincinnati. One trap for researchers: there is a different, British businessman called Jonathan Goldstein, and he is not this one.

A million handbells, and no origin line.

Schulmerich Bells makes large claims, which we attribute: that it is the “world’s largest producer of handbells” and the “world’s largest and oldest existing handbell company”; that “For over 50 years we’ve produced well over a million handbells”; and that it offers “up to seven complete octaves of handbells — 85 notes, C2–C9.” It also sells handchimes under the registered name MelodyChime.

It does not say where they are made. We checked its homepage, about page and contact page on 2 October 2026 for “Made in” and “Hatfield” and found neither, though the same pages returned its full company text. So we describe it as based in Hatfield, not as making its bells there. The words it does use, instead, are “Made By Artisans.”

Bell metal is a bronze of roughly four parts copper to one of tin — “approximately 78% copper and 22% tin,” according to the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America, “heated in a furnace to above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.” Tin is the scarce ingredient: the US Geological Survey says “Tin has not been mined or smelted in the United States since 1993 or 1989, respectively,” and that the average New York dealer price for refined tin rose 13 per cent in 2025, to 1,600 cents a pound.

In 2014 UNESCO selected Belgium’s programme for “Safeguarding the carillon culture” for its Register of Good Safeguarding Practices, noting that the programme “exists in seventy-six cities and villages of Belgium and in thirty countries worldwide.” The Guild of Carillonneurs in North America counts “more than 180 carillons in North America and more than 450 elsewhere in the world.” Schulmerich’s carillon business, now part of Verdin, made the electro-mechanical alternative to those cast-bell instruments.

Bells are also rung by hand, and that tradition has its own recognition: in 2022 UNESCO inscribed manual bell ringing in Spain on its Representative List, and in 2024 extended it to Italy, describing it as “a form of communication that is tied to the classification, acoustics and shapes of bells, bell towers and belfries.” We found no UNESCO listing for bell casting itself. English handbells, Schulmerich’s product, are a related tradition: tuned bells rung in the hand, by a team, one note per player.

A founder’s name on two businesses.

Schulmerich’s handbell business uses three short lines — “A Tradition of Sound,” “Made By Artisans,” “A Grand Scale” — and the claim “Innovators since 1935.” The founder’s surname has carried both businesses for ninety years. Its handchimes, by contrast, sell under a separate registered name, MelodyChime.

For a design guide, Schulmerich is a case of one founder’s name serving two owners. The carillons went to Verdin, the handbells stayed in Pennsylvania, and both still trade on George Schulmerich’s name. Its rivalry with Malmark — founded by its own former chief engineer — is a reminder that a brand’s best designer can become its competitor. Compare Verdin, now the owner of its carillons, and Taylor’s, an English foundry rescued by its own customers.

The Sellersville factory, the brand’s home for most of its history, is gone too: the site where Schulmerich made carillons and handbells for seventy years is now townhomes. What remains is the name, the product and the claim of a million handbells.

For this guide we use a crimson and a blush with a sans serif, an unofficial interpretation. No handbell, chime or logo is reproduced.

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