The Invention of the Car Radio

PART 1: HERE'S THE STORY:

Seems like cars have always had radios, but they didn’t.    

One evening, in 1929, two young men, William Lear & Elmer Wavering, drove their girlfriends to a lookout point on the Mississippi River town of Quincy, Illinois, to watch the sunset. It was a romantic night, but one of the women observed that it would be nicer if they could listen to music in the car. Lear & Wavering liked the idea. Both men had tinkered with radios & it wasn’t long before

they were taking apart a home radio & trying to get it to work in a car. But it wasn’t easy: automobiles have ignition switches, generators, spark plugs, & other electrical equipment that generate noisy static interference, making it nearly impossible to listen to the radio with the engine running. One by one, Lear & Wavering identified & 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, of Galvin Manufacturing Corp. He made a product called a “battery eliminator”, a device that allowed battery-powered radios to run on household current. But as more homes were wired for electricity, more radio manufacturers made AC-radios. Galvin needed a new product to manufacture. When he met Lear & Wavering at the convention, he found it. He believed that mass-produced, affordable car radios had the potential to become a huge business. Lear & Wavering set up shop in Galvin’s factory, & when they perfected their 1st 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, ½ hour after the installation, the 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 Assoc Convention. Too broke to afford a booth, he parked the car outside the convention hall & cranked up the radio so that passing conventioneers could hear it. That idea worked -- He got enough orders to put the radio into production.

PART 2: WHAT’S IN A NAME:

That first production model was called the 5T71. Galvin decided he needed to come up with something catchier. Then, many companies in phonograph & radio used the suffix “ola” for their names - Radiola, Columbiola, & Victrola were the biggest. 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.

But even with the change, the radio still had problems: When Motorola went on sale in 1930, it cost about $110 uninstalled, when you could buy a new car for $650, & the U.S. 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 & a single speaker could be installed & 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. The installation manual had eight diagrams & twenty-eight pages of instructions. Selling complicated car radios that cost 20% of the price of a new car wouldn’t have been easy in the best of times, let alone during the Great Depression. Galvin lost money in 1930 & struggled for 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 Co to sell & install them in its chain of stores. By then, the price of the radio, with installation included, had dropped to $55. The Motorola car radio was off & running. (The name was officially changed 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 car radio that was factory preset to a single frequency for police broadcasts. In 1940, he developed the first handheld two-way radio, ‘The Handy-Talkie’ for the Army.

Many communications technologies were born in Motorola labs in the years that followed WW II. In 1947, they came out with the 1st television for under $200. In 1956, the company introduced the world’s first pager. In 1969, came the radio & television that televised Neil Armstrong’s 1st steps on the Moon. In 1973, it invented the world’s 1st 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 & William Lear, ended up taking very different life paths. Wavering stayed with Motorola. In the 1950's he helped change the automobile experience again when he developed the 1st automotive alternator, replacing unreliable generators. The invention lead to such luxuries as power windows & 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 is his contribution 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, & in 1963 introduced his most famous invention, the Lear Jet, the world’s 1st 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!