How Car Audio Came to BE

[Mel Jones]

Kinda of a long read, not as long as it seems, but I put together a little story about how car car audio and other audio things came to be. It is an interesting read when you have time 🙂 I think the pictures are easier to read 🙂

So, one night, long ago, in 1929, two men named William Lear & Elmer Wavering took their “lady friends” to a lookout point in Illinois, “to watch the sunset”. One of their gals said it would be more romantic if they could listen to the radio in the car (See women have great tech ideas)
Lear & Wavering were stoked by this, & both of these guys had messed around with radios (Lear was as a radio operator in the U.S. Navy during World War I) & it didn’t take long before they were taking the home radio, disassembling it & trying to get it to work in a car. Of course, as they found, it was not that easy, vehicles have ignition switches, generators, spark plugs, & a whole slew of other electrical stuff that causes noisy static interference, (like a backseat driver) making it almost impossible, at that time, to listen to the radio if the car was actually running.


So, they started one piece at a time, & the men, Lear & Wavering, Identified and eliminated each source of electrical interference. Then they got it to work! They took it to a radio convention in Chicago, which is where they met Paul Galvin, owner of Galvin Manufacturing Corporation
Now, Mr. Galvin made a product called a “battery eliminator”, a device that allowed battery-powered radios to run on household AC current (genius!) However, the more homes that were wired for electricity, the more radio manufacturers Made AC-powered radios.


Well, this Galvin guy, he needed a new product & when he met the two fellers Lear & Wavering at the convention, he found it. He believed that mass-produced, affordable car radios had the potential to become a huge business


Not long after, our two guys, Lear & Wavering, set up shop at Mr. Galvin’s place, & guess what? When they perfected their first radio, they installed it in a Studebaker!
Mr. Galvin decided to hit up the local banker & apply for a loan, he was thinking to sweeten the deal, he would have his men install a radio in the banker’s Packard, didn’t work ☹ It was like 30 min after Galvin’s men had installed the radio into the Packard, that is caught on fire, needless to say, no loan, but our Mr. Galvin man did not give up! He said to heck with the banker and hopped in his Studebaker, drove almost 800 miles to Atlantic City and showed off his radio at the 1930 Radio Manufacturers Association convention
Now, since he did not get the loan, he was broke as a joke, so, he parked his car outside of the convention & blared the radio so that everyone could hear it…THAT idea DID work, and he ended up getting enough orders to start production of the radio


WHAT’S IN A NAME
The first model he called the 5T71, but Mr. Galvin knew 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. So, Mr. 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. (Mind blown!)
However, even with the awesome new name change, his radio still had problems: In the 1930’s when Mr. Galvin put the radio on sale the cost, uninstalled, was around $110. In the 1930’s you could buy a whole new freakin car for $650, not to mention during that time the country was sliding into the Great Depression. Calculating that in today’s time that would make a radio for a car about $3000 today!
It also took two people to install a car radio back then, they had to take the dashboard apart so one single speaker & the receiver could be installed, & the dang ceiling had to be cut open to install an antenna! The first radios ran on their own batteries, not on the car battery, so on top of everything, holes had to be cut into the floorboard to the batteries. The installation manual alone had 8 diagrams like full diagrams, & 28 pages of written instructions!! This wouldn’t have been an easy sale even if it wasn’t the Great Depression.
Mr. Galvin lost money in 1930 & struggled for a couple of years after that, but things picked up in 1933 when Ford began offering Motorola radios pre-installed at the factory and to make it better, in 1934 the guys got another boost when Mr. Galvin struck a deal with B.F. Goodrich, the tire company, to sell & install them in its chain of tire stores. This dropped the price from $110 to $55 & the Motorola car radio was off & banging!


The name of the company would be officially changed from Galvin Manufacturing to “Motorola” in 1947
While business was good, Mr. Galvin kept striving 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. Not one to stop, Mr. Galvin then developed the first handheld two-way radio in 1940, called “The Handy-Talkie”, specifically for the U. S. Army.


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 & television equipment that was used to televise Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon! (One giant leap is an understatement!) In 1973 it invented the world’s first handheld cellular phone


WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE 2 FELLERS WHO INSTALLED THE FIRST RADIO IN MR. GALVIN’S CAR?
Elmer Wavering & William Lear took two very different paths, Wavering, he stayed with Motorola. Wavering did something we thank him for everyday in the 950’s, he developed the first automotive alternator, replacing inefficient & unreliable generators. This then led to power windows, locks, power seats & air-conditioning! Lear also continued inventing; he holds more than 150 patents. Remember those things your parents told you about, eight-track tape players? Welp, 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 (Not bad for a guy who dropped out of school after the eighth grade)

[Stycker]

Radio 1/6th the cost of the car. I think I'm currently there. Nice to see things haven't changed much.