Hey all! My Dad sent me this; it's an interesting piece of automobile history. I thought I"d share it with you all.
The Story of the Car Radio:
Seems like cars have always
had radios, but they didn't -- Here's the true
story:
SUNSET
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.
SIGNING ON
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 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.
HIT THE
ROAD
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.
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.)