Story of Perseverance – How Car Radio Began!
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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, IL, to watch the sunset. It was a romantic night, 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 and it wasn’t long before they were taking apart a home radio and trying to get it to work in a car.
It wasn’t easy since automobiles have ignition switches, generators, spark plugs, and other electrical equipment that generates 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. However, 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. Galvin then 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.
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. Galvin decided to do the same thing. Since his radio was intended for use in a motor vehicle, he decided to call it the Motorola.
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. 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 the 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.
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 pre-set 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. Many 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 manufactures in the world and it all started with the car radio.
Sometimes it is fun to find out how some of the many things that we take for granted actually came into being.
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