[SFDXA] Motorola

[Bill]

 From Elliot KB2TZ:

  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.)