Hi all, I just got this from another list and thought you would enjoy it!
73:
John
John Jacques
Amateur Radio Station: KD8PC
"Where Cat Is, Is Civilization!"
--------- Forwarded message ----------
HISTORY OF THE CAR RADIO
Seems like cars have always had radios, not true. Here's the true story:
One evening, in 1929, two young men named William Lear and Elmer
Wavering drove their girlfriends to a lookout point high above the
Mississippi River town of Quincy, Illinois, to watch the sunset. It was
a romantic night to be sure, but one of the women observed that it
would be even nicer if they could listen to music in the car.
Lear and Wavering liked the idea. Both men had tinkered with radios
(Lear had served as a radio operator in the U. S. Navy during World War
I) and it wasn't long before they were taking apart a home radio and
trying to get it to work in a car. But it wasn't as easy as it sounds:
automobiles have ignition switches, generators, spark plugs, and other
electrical equipment that generate noisy static interference, making it
nearly impossible to listen to the radio when the engine was running.
One by one, Lear and Wavering identified and eliminated each source of
electrical interference. When they finally got their radio to work,
they took it to a radio convention in Chicago. There they met Paul
Galvin, owner of Galvin Manufacturing Corporation. He made a product
called a "battery eliminator" a device that allowed battery-powered
radios to run on household AC current. But as more homes were wired for
electricity more radio manufacturers made AC-powered radios. Galvin
needed a new product to manufacture. When he met Lear and Wavering at
the radio convention, he found it. He believed that mass-produced,
affordable car radios had the potential to become a huge business.
Lear and Wavering set up shop in Galvin's factory, and when they
perfected their first radio, they installed it in his Studebaker. Then
Galvin went to a local banker to apply for a loan. Thinking it might
sweeten the deal, he had his men install a radio in the banker's
Packard. Good idea, but it didn't work -- Half an hour after the
installation, the banker's Packard caught on fire. (They didn't get the
loan.) Galvin didn't give up. He drove his Studebaker nearly 800 miles
to Atlantic City to show off the radio at the 1930 Radio Manufacturers
Association convention.
Too broke to afford a booth, he parked the car outside the convention
hall and cranked up the radio so that passing conventioneers could hear
it. That idea worked -- He got enough orders to put the radio into
production.
WHAT'S IN A NAME
That first production model was called the 5T71. Galvin decided he
needed to come up with something a little catchier. In those days many
companies in the phonograph and radio businesses used the suffix "ola"
for their names - Radiola, Columbiola, and Victrola were three of the
biggest. Galvin decided to do the same thing, and since his radio was
intended for use in a motor vehicle, he decided to call it the
Motorola. But even with the name change, the radio still had problems:
When Motorola went on sale in 1930, it cost about $110 uninstalled, at
a time when you could buy a brand-new car for $650, and the country was
sliding into the Great Depression. (By that measure, a radio for a new
car would cost about $3,000 today.) In 1930 it took two men several
days to put in a carradio -- The dashboard had to be taken apart so
that the receiver and a single speaker could be installed, and the
ceiling had to be cut open to install the antenna. These early radios
ran on their own batteries, not on the car battery, so holes had to be
cut into the floorboard to accommodate them.
The installation manual had eight complete diagrams and 28 pages of
instructions.
Selling complicated car radios that cost 20 percent of the price of a
brand-new car wouldn't have been easy in the best of times, let alone
during the Great Depression --
Galvin lost money in 1930 and struggled for a couple of years after
that. But things picked up in 1933 when Ford began offering Motorola's
pre-installed at the factory. In 1934 they got another boost when
Galvin struck a deal with B. F. Goodrich tire company to sell and
install them in its chain of tire stores. By then the price of the
radio, installation included, had dropped to $55. The Motorola car
radio was off and running. (The name of the company would be officially
changed from Galvin Manufacturing to "Motorola" in 1947.)
In the meantime, Galvin continued to develop new uses for car radios.
In 1936, the same year that it introduced push-button tuning, it also
introduced the Motorola Police Cruiser, a standard car radio that was
factory preset to a single frequency to pick up police broadcasts. In
1940 he developed with the first handheld two-way radio -- The
Handie-Talkie -- for the U. S. Army.
A lot of the communications technologies that we take for granted
today were born in Motorola labs in the years that followed World War
II. In 1947 they came out with the first television to sell under $200.
In 1956 the company introduced the world's first pager; in 1969 it
supplied the radio and television equipment that was used to televise
Neil Armstrong's first steps on the Moon. In 1973 it invented the
world's first handheld cellular phone. Today Motorola is one of the
largest cell phone manufacturers in the world -- And it all started
with the car radio.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO The two men who installed the first radio in Paul
Galvin's car, Elmer Wavering and William Lear, ended up taking very
different paths in life. Wavering stayed with Motorola. In the 1950's
he helped change the automobile experience again when he developed the
first automotive alternator, replacing inefficient and unreliable
generators. The invention lead to such luxuries as power windows, power
seats, and, eventually, air-conditioning.
Lear also continued inventing. He holds more than 150 patents.
Remember eight-track tape players? Lear invented that. But what he's
really famous for are his contributions to the field of aviation. He
invented radio direction finders for planes, aided in the invention of
the autopilot, designed the first fully automatic aircraft landing
system, and in 1963 introduced his most famous invention of all, the
Lear Jet, the world's first mass-produced, affordable business jet.
(Not bad for a guy who dropped out of school after the eighth grade.)
Sometimes it is fun to find out how some of the many things that we
take for granted actually came into being! and It all started with a
woman's suggestion!
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