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.
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 the1930 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 installed, 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!!
