Subject: HISTORY OF THE CAR RADIO
Seems like cars have always had radios, but they didn't. Here's the 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 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 easy: 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 theMotorola. 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 car radio -- 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, with 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 the first Hand held two-way radio -- The Handy-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 for under $200. In 1956 the company
introduced the world's first pager; in 1969 came 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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