Car radio a golden-oldie idea: If you wanted tunes, you had to sing them

WASHINGTON — Road music is taken for granted these days. Yet 75 years ago, all you could hear in a car was chatter and clatter. If you wanted music, you sang as you drove. Your friends and family should thank Elmer Wavering, William Lear and Paul Galvin for sparing their ears from your voice.

In 1929, Wavering and Lear drove their girlfriends to catch a sunset from a scenic parking spot on a high bluff overlooking Quincy, Ill.

The women suggested it would be really cool to have music in the car, and the two tech-minded radio tinkerers thought that sounded like a neat idea.

Soon after, Lear met fellow tinkerer and fledgling radio manufacturer Galvin at a Chicago radio convention, and he invited Lear and Wavering to build a radio from scratch and install it in his Studebaker sedan.

In the 1920s, Henry Ford introduced the mass-produced automobile, and in 1926, radios were first introduced in cars — portable, battery-driven "travel radios."

Some folks had radios installed on a custom basis, but that was quite the luxury at $250 a pop (the equivalent of $2,845 today).

Not surprisingly the market was pretty small, but Wavering, Lear and Galvin thought that by mass-producing car radios, and thus lowering the price, they could create a large new market.

After literally test-driving his sonically souped-up Studebaker over 795 rough miles, Galvin arrived at the June 1930 Radio Manufacturers Association convention in Atlantic City, N.J.

Unable to afford a booth at the show, he parked outside the front door and (thanks to a speaker Wavering had installed under the hood) cranked up his radio to capture the attention of conventiongoers as they walked from their cars to the exhibition hall.

By the end of the convention, Galvin had received a few orders for the 5T71 car radio, which cost $110 and which owners installed themselves. For the year, sales totaled $287,000, with a loss of $3,745.

It would be the only loss suffered by the company, which soon changed its name from Galvin Manufacturing to Motorola, a new word taken from "motor" and "Victrola" to suggest sound in motion.

Wavering and Lear soon split with Galvin but would continue to play a major role in your car comfort and listening pleasure.

Lear (yes, the one behind Learjet, the world's first mass-produced business jet) invented the eight-track cartridge tape system.

And like Galvin, he struck a marketing deal with Ford, which in 1966 began offering factory-installed in-dash eight-track players in all its cars. (A year later, Chrysler and GM did the same.)

The eight-track became the pre-eminent car audio format through the 1970s and paved the way for all sorts of innovations in portable listening. Cassette tapes and CDs came later. Cheap, durable and portable, cassette tapes were seen by the record industry as exactly the same piracy threat that downloading is today.