[Boatanchors] Car Radios

Fri Jan 20 22:26:32 EST 2012

Strictly Moto BS.Its been going around like a virus recently.

Philco was the first volume auto radio producer and there were other 
examples going back to 1922.

Carl
KM1H

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bob Macklin" <macklinbob at gmail.com>
To: "Boatanchors list" <boatanchors at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Friday, January 20, 2012 8:49 PM
Subject: [Boatanchors] Car Radios

Subject: CAR RADIOS

      JANUARY 19, 2012

      Interesting reading, particularly, if you did not know the background 
of the car radio.

        ---------- 

        How car radios came to be...

        Radios are so much a part of the driving experience, it seems like 
cars have always had them. But they didn't. Here’s the story.

        SUNDOWN

        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 second-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.)

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