History OF THE CAR RADIO
Seems like cars have always had radios,
but they didn't.
Here's the story:
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 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 easy: 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 Victrolawere 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. 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, with 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 Handy-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 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 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 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 whenhe 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 autopilo, 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.)
Sometimes it is fun to find out how some of the many things that we take for granted actuallycame into being!
AND THIS
The Goldberg Brothers
Inventors of the Automobile Air Conditioner
AUTOMOTIVE A/C HISTORY
Here's a little fact for automotive buffs, or just to dazzle your friends.
The four Goldberg brothers, Lowell, Norman, Hiram, and Max, invented and developed the first automobile air-conditioner. Now the problem became how to market it and to whom.
On July 17, 1946, the temperature in Detroit was 97 degrees. The four brothers walked into old man Henry Ford's office and sweet-talked his secretary into telling him that four gentlemen were there with the most exciting innovation in the auto industry since the electric starter.
Henry was curious and invited them into his office. They refused and instead asked that he come out to the parking lot to their car. They persuaded him to get into the car, which was about 130 degrees inside. They turned on the air conditioner, and cooled the car off immediately.
Henry got very excited and invited them back to the office where he offered them $3 million for the patent.
The brothers refused his offer. They counter offered saying they would settle for $2 million, but they wanted the recognition by having a label, “The Goldberg Air-Conditioner” on the dashboard of each car in which it was installed.
Henry Ford was known to be highly anti-Semitic and there was no way he was ever going to put the Goldberg's name on two million Fords but he wanted their product badly.
After haggling back and forth for the rest of the day, they finally reached an agreement of $4 million but that just their first names would be shown.
And so, to this day, all Ford air conditioners show LO, NORM, HI, and MAX on the air conditioning control panel.
don't thank me guys and girls
I feel it is my duty to keep you informed
badbobby wrote:
History OF THE CAR RADIO
Seems like cars have always had radios,
but they didn't.
Here's the story:
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 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 easy: 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 Victrolawere 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. 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, with 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 Handy-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 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 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 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 whenhe 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 autopilo, 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.)
Sometimes it is fun to find out how some of the many things that we take for granted actuallycame into being!
AND THIS
The Goldberg Brothers
Inventors of the Automobile Air Conditioner
AUTOMOTIVE A/C HISTORY
Here's a little fact for automotive buffs, or just to dazzle your friends.
The four Goldberg brothers, Lowell, Norman, Hiram, and Max, invented and developed the first automobile air-conditioner. Now the problem became how to market it and to whom.
On July 17, 1946, the temperature in Detroit was 97 degrees. The four brothers walked into old man Henry Ford's office and sweet-talked his secretary into telling him that four gentlemen were there with the most exciting innovation in the auto industry since the electric starter.
Henry was curious and invited them into his office. They refused and instead asked that he come out to the parking lot to their car. They persuaded him to get into the car, which was about 130 degrees inside. They turned on the air conditioner, and cooled the car off immediately.
Henry got very excited and invited them back to the office where he offered them $3 million for the patent.
The brothers refused his offer. They counter offered saying they would settle for $2 million, but they wanted the recognition by having a label, “The Goldberg Air-Conditioner” on the dashboard of each car in which it was installed.
Henry Ford was known to be highly anti-Semitic and there was no way he was ever going to put the Goldberg's name on two million Fords but he wanted their product badly.
After haggling back and forth for the rest of the day, they finally reached an agreement of $4 million but that just their first names would be shown.
And so, to this day, all Ford air conditioners show LO, NORM, HI, and MAX on the air conditioning control panel.
don't thank me guys and girls
I feel it is my duty to keep you informed
History OF THE CAR RADIO br br Seems like cars ha... (
show quote)
...................................
Gotta thank you anyway. Fascinating bits of history. I spent nearly 50 years working in electronics and love this kind of stuff. Thanks a million. nutz4fish
................................
badbobby wrote:
History OF THE CAR RADIO
Seems like cars have always had radios,
but they didn't.
Here's the story:
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 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 easy: 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 Victrolawere 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. 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, with 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 Handy-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 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 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 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 whenhe 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 autopilo, 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.)
Sometimes it is fun to find out how some of the many things that we take for granted actuallycame into being!
AND THIS
The Goldberg Brothers
Inventors of the Automobile Air Conditioner
AUTOMOTIVE A/C HISTORY
Here's a little fact for automotive buffs, or just to dazzle your friends.
The four Goldberg brothers, Lowell, Norman, Hiram, and Max, invented and developed the first automobile air-conditioner. Now the problem became how to market it and to whom.
On July 17, 1946, the temperature in Detroit was 97 degrees. The four brothers walked into old man Henry Ford's office and sweet-talked his secretary into telling him that four gentlemen were there with the most exciting innovation in the auto industry since the electric starter.
Henry was curious and invited them into his office. They refused and instead asked that he come out to the parking lot to their car. They persuaded him to get into the car, which was about 130 degrees inside. They turned on the air conditioner, and cooled the car off immediately.
Henry got very excited and invited them back to the office where he offered them $3 million for the patent.
The brothers refused his offer. They counter offered saying they would settle for $2 million, but they wanted the recognition by having a label, “The Goldberg Air-Conditioner” on the dashboard of each car in which it was installed.
Henry Ford was known to be highly anti-Semitic and there was no way he was ever going to put the Goldberg's name on two million Fords but he wanted their product badly.
After haggling back and forth for the rest of the day, they finally reached an agreement of $4 million but that just their first names would be shown.
And so, to this day, all Ford air conditioners show LO, NORM, HI, and MAX on the air conditioning control panel.
don't thank me guys and girls
I feel it is my duty to keep you informed
History OF THE CAR RADIO br br Seems like cars ha... (
show quote)
And thank you very much Sir, that was very interesting and COOL,,,,, lo,norm ,hi and max that so amazing(now tell me your not kidding?)
Good stuff bobby. Thanks.
Jarheadfishnfool wrote:
And thank you very much Sir, that was very interesting and COOL,,,,, lo,norm ,hi and max that so amazing(now tell me your not kidding?)
not too sure Jarhead but I think not
badbobby wrote:
History OF THE CAR RADIO
Seems like cars have always had radios,
but they didn't.
Here's the story:
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 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 easy: 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 Victrolawere 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. 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, with 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 Handy-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 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 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 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 whenhe 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 autopilo, 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.)
Sometimes it is fun to find out how some of the many things that we take for granted actuallycame into being!
AND THIS
The Goldberg Brothers
Inventors of the Automobile Air Conditioner
AUTOMOTIVE A/C HISTORY
Here's a little fact for automotive buffs, or just to dazzle your friends.
The four Goldberg brothers, Lowell, Norman, Hiram, and Max, invented and developed the first automobile air-conditioner. Now the problem became how to market it and to whom.
On July 17, 1946, the temperature in Detroit was 97 degrees. The four brothers walked into old man Henry Ford's office and sweet-talked his secretary into telling him that four gentlemen were there with the most exciting innovation in the auto industry since the electric starter.
Henry was curious and invited them into his office. They refused and instead asked that he come out to the parking lot to their car. They persuaded him to get into the car, which was about 130 degrees inside. They turned on the air conditioner, and cooled the car off immediately.
Henry got very excited and invited them back to the office where he offered them $3 million for the patent.
The brothers refused his offer. They counter offered saying they would settle for $2 million, but they wanted the recognition by having a label, “The Goldberg Air-Conditioner” on the dashboard of each car in which it was installed.
Henry Ford was known to be highly anti-Semitic and there was no way he was ever going to put the Goldberg's name on two million Fords but he wanted their product badly.
After haggling back and forth for the rest of the day, they finally reached an agreement of $4 million but that just their first names would be shown.
And so, to this day, all Ford air conditioners show LO, NORM, HI, and MAX on the air conditioning control panel.
don't thank me guys and girls
I feel it is my duty to keep you informed
History OF THE CAR RADIO br br Seems like cars ha... (
show quote)
Awesome stories Bobby, I used to have a Lear 8 Track player, and had no idea it was the Lear Jet guy. Thanks for the knowledge.
badbobby wrote:
not too sure Jarhead but I think not
Thank You my Friend for adding more Info into my Jarhead!!
Thanks for one of the most interesting history lessons I’ve ever experienced bb, all told in a captivating story.
Billycrap2
Loc: Mason county,W(BY GOD) Virginia, 🇺🇸🦅
As Gomer Pile said SHAZAM 😎😎😎
HenryG
Loc: Falmouth Cape Cod Massachusetts
badbobby wrote:
History OF THE CAR RADIO
Seems like cars have always had radios,
but they didn't.
Here's the story:
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 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 easy: 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 Victrolawere 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. 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, with 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 Handy-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 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 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 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 whenhe 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 autopilo, 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.)
Sometimes it is fun to find out how some of the many things that we take for granted actuallycame into being!
AND THIS
The Goldberg Brothers
Inventors of the Automobile Air Conditioner
AUTOMOTIVE A/C HISTORY
Here's a little fact for automotive buffs, or just to dazzle your friends.
The four Goldberg brothers, Lowell, Norman, Hiram, and Max, invented and developed the first automobile air-conditioner. Now the problem became how to market it and to whom.
On July 17, 1946, the temperature in Detroit was 97 degrees. The four brothers walked into old man Henry Ford's office and sweet-talked his secretary into telling him that four gentlemen were there with the most exciting innovation in the auto industry since the electric starter.
Henry was curious and invited them into his office. They refused and instead asked that he come out to the parking lot to their car. They persuaded him to get into the car, which was about 130 degrees inside. They turned on the air conditioner, and cooled the car off immediately.
Henry got very excited and invited them back to the office where he offered them $3 million for the patent.
The brothers refused his offer. They counter offered saying they would settle for $2 million, but they wanted the recognition by having a label, “The Goldberg Air-Conditioner” on the dashboard of each car in which it was installed.
Henry Ford was known to be highly anti-Semitic and there was no way he was ever going to put the Goldberg's name on two million Fords but he wanted their product badly.
After haggling back and forth for the rest of the day, they finally reached an agreement of $4 million but that just their first names would be shown.
And so, to this day, all Ford air conditioners show LO, NORM, HI, and MAX on the air conditioning control panel.
don't thank me guys and girls
I feel it is my duty to keep you informed
History OF THE CAR RADIO br br Seems like cars ha... (
show quote)
Some darn good reading there badbobby thanks👍😀
If you want to reply, then
register here. Registration is free and your account is created instantly, so you can post right away.
