> 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.
> 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 carradio --
> 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, 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
> 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 the
> 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.
> 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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