SUNDOWN
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 second-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.)
