[SFDXA] Car Radios...

[Bill]

You might have read this story before. But it's such a cool story, I
thought I'd pass it on anyway.
>>
>>         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!!
>>