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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
handheld
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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