Subject: FW: Fw: The First Car Radio!
From: "Char Olson" <[email-masked]>
To: "Bahe Gale" <[email-masked]>, "Barganz Lynda" <[email-masked]>, "Bessler Linda" <[email-masked]>, "Breneman Debbie" <[email-masked]>, "Cooper Linda" <[email-masked]>, "Doyle Sandy" <[email-masked]>, "Eckstein Bob & JoAnn" <[email-masked]>, "Eide Eunice" <[email-masked]>, "Elsing Diane" <[email-masked]>, "Ethun Karen" <[email-masked]>, "Farnsworth Stu" <[email-masked]>, "Hahn Camille" <[email-masked]>, "Hamilton Allan" <[email-masked]>, "Hamilton David" <[email-masked]>, "Heron Tracy" <[email-masked]>, "Higgason Teri" <h
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:32:19 -0600

From: David Paepke [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2012 5:53 PM
To: Ben Paepke; Betty Alley; Bob & Emily Bethke; Bob Manis; Carolyn Gunning;
[email-masked]; clark paepke; dan Ard; Daniel C. Abel; dave gasaway; Jack
Wilcock; Jim & Nancy Bethke; Linda Yanke; LuAnn Young l; Lynn Haroldsen;
Mark Neish; Marshall Paepke; Matthew Paepke; michael ard; Michael Struiksma;
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Paepke; Sarah Paepke; Tanner Paepke; Tiffany Paepke; TOM
Subject: Fwd: Fw: The First Car Radio!

 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: john allen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 8:29 PM
Subject: Fw: The First Car Radio!
To: David Paepke <[email-masked]>

Dave, ever once in awhile we need to obtain some knowledge also.  Are you
getting any snow yet?  We are having a heat wave in January.

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Barry Allen <[email-masked]>
To: John Allen <[email-masked]>
Sent: Wed, January 18, 2012 5:07:43 PM
Subject: Fw: The First Car Radio!

 

 

This is a really interesting true story about how radios were first
installed in cars.

These same individuals were responsible for other inventions that you will
recognize too.  Be sure to read the entire story.....

 CAR RADIO, AN INTERESTING STORY

HOW MOTOROLA GOT IT'S NAME
CAR TUNES

Radios are so much a part of the driving experience, it seems like cars have
always had them. But they didnt. Heres the story.

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 wasnt
long before they were taking apart a home radio and trying to get it to work
in a car. But it wasnt 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 Galvins 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 bankers Packard. Good idea, but it didnt
work half an hour after the installation, the bankers Packard caught on
fire. (They didnt get the loan.) 

Galvin didnt 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. 

WHATS 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 wouldnt 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
Motorolas 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 worlds first pager; in 1969 it supplied the radio and
television equipment that was used to televise Neil Armstrongs first steps
on the Moon. In 1973 it invented the worlds 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 Galvins car, Elmer
Wavering and William Lear, ended up taking very different paths in life.
Wavering stayed with Motorola. In the 1950s 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 hes 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 worlds first mass-produced,
affordable business jet. (Not bad for a guy who dropped out of school after
the eighth grade.)

 

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