I'd heard that one of Bill Lear's sons was named Banda,
to go along with the daughter Shanda.
Turns out that "Banda" might at best have been a nick-name,
if that.
Shanda was born in 1944.
Neil Vedder
On 11/28/2012 11:09 AM, Ron Swartley wrote:
You will find this story very interesting and very educational---only in
America.!!
Ron
Subj: HISTORY OF THE CAR RADIO
HISTORY OF THE CAR RADIO Seems like cars have always had radios,
but they didn't. Here's the true 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 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. 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.
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 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.)
Sometimes it is fun to find out how some of the many things that we
take for granted actually came into being! and It all started with a
woman's suggestion!
=
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