What Does An Antique Car Radio and a Lear Jet Have In Common?

Most of us grew up with cars that had an "in dash" radio as an option, and if you grew up in the1970's or later a radio was pretty much standard equipment by then. FM radio has also been the standard since the 1970's, and prior to that AM Radio was the standard. We pretty much take the radio option for granted and don't really consider a radio an option anymore. So how did the car radio option get started in the first place?

William Lear

As the story goes... one evening, in 1929, two men, 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.

Elmer Wavering

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. Problems arose in spades.

Automobiles have ignition switches, generators, spark plugs, and other electrical equipment all of which generates noisy static interference, which made it nearly impossible to listen to the radio with the engine running.

One by one, Lear and Wavering identified and eliminated each source of electrical interference. When they finally got their car 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 began offering AC-powered radios.

Paul Galvin

Galvin needed a new product to manufacture. When he met Lear and Wavering at the radio convention, it was the perfect match.  Galvin quickly determined 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 Galvin's Studebaker. Then Galvin went to a local banker to apply for a loan. Thinking it might sweeten the deal, he had two of his employees install a radio in the banker's Packard. Good idea in theory, but it didn't work. Half an hour after the installation, the banker's Packard caught on fire. No 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.

That first production model was called the 5T71. Galvin decided he needed to come up a different name, 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.

By the way....if you are wondering if this is the same Motorola Company that is in business today making cell phones and the like, you would be correct.

But even with the name change, the automotive radios still had problems: When the Motorola Radio 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.

Galvin's company experienced poor sales beginning in 1930 and lasting thru the end of 1932, due in part to the depression . 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 Motorola radios in its chain of tire stores. With the help of the Ford contract, the price of the radio, installation included, had dropped to $55. The Motorola car radio was off and running. Galvin would officially change the name of his company to the "Motorola" Company in 1947.

In the meantime, Galvin continued to develop new uses for car radios.
In 1936, the same year that Motorola 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.

So...what happened to the original 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 held more than 150 patents at his death. Remember eight-track tape players? Lear invented those. But he really became famous for 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.

From AM to FM

AM radio is very prone to background noise and fading as we all know. One thing we learned as a kid was that the AM signal carries a long  distance at night. You might remember listing to the famous AM radio stations like WLS Chicago, KOA in Denver, and other even though you lived a 800 miles from those stations like I did. You could only get them at night but they were  often crystal clear! On stormy nights they would fade in and out but they were still worth listening to. Oh...and for you tech oriented followers...

The definition of amplitude (as in AM Radio) refers to the length and width of the sound waves as they move or vibrate.
How much a radio wave moves back and forth is an example of its amplitude.

During the 1920s, Edwin Armstrong an electrical engineer, was working on ways to improve radio. FM was the logical choice to Edwin, but FM had been largely dismissed because of another engineer John Carson, whose experiments showed that FM would not be an improvement in quality over AM.

Edwin Armstrong

In 1928, Armstrong discovered a way to improve FM radio despite its detractors, the key was using a wider bandwidth. Armstrong promptly filed for patents in 1933. He then offered RCA the right of first refusal for his new system, but RCA was unimpressed with a system, that was more complex and was not compatible with existing equipment.

Armstrong then went to smaller radio companies like General Electric and Zenith. He also got the FCC to allocate a band for this new kind of radio with 40 channels in the 42 to 50 MHz range. You might notice that this isn’t where the FM band is today. Hang on...I will get to that in a minute.

A significant characteristic of FM as compared with AM is that FM stations using the same frequency do not interfere with each other. Radios simply pick up whichever FM station is the strongest. This means that low-power FM stations can operate in close proximity to each other.

In radio transmission, an advantage of frequency modulation (FM Radio) is that it has a larger signal-to-noise ratio and therefore rejects radio frequency interference better than an equal power amplitude modulation (AM) signal. 

Armstrong was hindered in his further development of FM radio by the location of the newly assigned FM spectrum by the Federal Communications Commission, which he blamed on RCA. RCA considered the new FM signal as a threat to their existing businesses and did everything they could to prevent Armstrong from demonstrating the system to the public. Despite this, Armstrong did get the FCC interested in FM and even built his own FM station W2XMN to help get things moving. In May of 1939 his first broadcast was to only 25 FM receivers... all that existed at the time.

RCA finally decided to get into the FM game, but they didn’t want to pay Armstrong royalties. So in 1940, they offered him a cool million dollars for a non-exclusive but royalty-free license. Armstrong didn’t feel like it was fair to other companies that were paying 2% on their sales. He refused the offer... which would prove to be a fateful and very costly decision

Armstrong expected to receive royalties on every FM radio set sold and, because FM was selected for the audio portion of TV broadcasting, he also expected royalties on every TV set sold. Some television manufacturers paid Armstrong, RCA didn’t. RCA soon developed and patented a FM system slightly different from Armstrong’s that he claimed involved no new principle.

So, in 1948, Armstrong filed legal suit against RCA and NBC, charging them with willfully infringing and inducing others to infringe on his FM patents.
It was to RCA’s advantage to drag the suit out. The company had more money than Armstrong did, and RCA could continue to make more money with their design until the case was settled by selling sets utilizing the technology Armstrong said was his.

To finance his lawsuit and his research facility at Columbia, Armstrong had to sell many of his assets, including stock in Zenith, RCA, and Standard Oil. By 1954, the financial burden imposed on him forced him to try to settle with RCA. RCA’s offer did not even cover Armstrong’s remaining legal fees. Not long after he received this offer he committed suicide.

And... I Know Your Gonna Ask...

Where do radio identification call letters come from? In the United States, the first letter generally is K for stations located west of the Mississippi River and W for stations east of the Mississippi. Historic exceptions in the east include KYW in Philadelphia and KDKA in Pittsburgh, while western exceptions include WHB in Kansas City.

Most all commercial radio stations have call signs made up of 4-characters. This has been the standard for close to sixty years.  Some of the very early radio stations have what are now considered historical 3-character call letters which are still in use today, such as KSL in Salt Lake City, KOA in Denver, WHO in Des Moines, WJW in Cleveland, WBT in Charlotte, WSM in Nashville, and WGN plus WLS-AM 890 and WLS-TV in Chicago. American radio stations are required to announce their call signs at the top of each hour, as well as sign-on and sign-off for stations that do not broadcast 24 hours.

All call signals are registered with the FCC and most are also assigned by the FCC as well.

And there you have it...the simplified version of the history of car radios. There were a few cars built in the early 1920's with radios installed but they were mostly converted dry cell powered home radio models that had been converted to car use. This is not your term paper history... this is just the basics so as you reach over to turn on that ivory colored knob in your dash, you can appreciate how that radio got there.