[RVRC] History of the car radio
drew Moore
drumor at optonline.net
Thu Oct 18 11:50:48 EDT 2012
>From Jesse Bell, K4QBS
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.
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
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.
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.)
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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