|
History of the Car
Radio
HISTORY OF THE CAR RADIO
Seems like cars have always had radios, but they didn't. Here's
the true 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 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.)
|
