[SFDXA] Motorola

[Kai Siwiak]

As if to end the story/era, today I received a check from Google for my 
shares of
of Motorola Mobility which they now own.
-Kai, KE4PT


Bill wrote:
>  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.)
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