[SFDXA] Car Radios...
Mike Williams
mj451 at bellsouth.net
Sat Feb 15 09:41:06 EST 2014
Good story Bill; as an ex Motorolan I can attest to the technical
astuteness of the company when they were in their prime. The Motorola
museum in Schaumburg holds a number of items, including the car radio
and of course the infamous handie talkies, as well as numerous other
technical marvels. Walking through the Motorola plant in Illinois and
Plantation, FL was always an impressive tour as it was a thriving
production arena of two way, cellular and military products. American
manufacturing at its best.
73 de W4DL Mike
On 2/14/2014 11:09 AM, Bill wrote:
>
> 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!!
>>>
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