Interesting.
HISTORY OF THE CAR RADIO
Seems like cars have always had radios,
but they didn't. 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 manufacturer in the world -- And it all started with the
car radio.
What ever happend 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!
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