![\"car](\"https:\/\/www.davison.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/car-radio-invention-300x199.jpg\" "\\"car")
Well, one story goes that on a cool summer evening in the 1920\u2019s, two young couples who were double dating parked up on a lookout under the moonlight and started to get romantic, when one of the young ladies said that the night would be even better if they could listen to some music in the car. \u00a0That got the young men thinking \u2013 both were tinkerers and part-time inventors \u2013 and it wasn\u2019t long before they were taking apart a home radio and trying to get it to work in a car.<\/p>\n
But they ran into a few problems because having a radio in a car is a lot different than having a radio in the home.\u00a0 Cars have a lot of electrical connections and circuits that generate electrical interference with the radio, and that causes a lot of static.\u00a0 So, it wasn\u2019t going to be as simple as just plopping a home radio into the car and riding off.\u00a0 But the two inventors were very resourceful, and they systematically identified and eliminated each one of the offending sources of static. And it worked.\u00a0 They had removed the static problem, so that the sound coming out of the radio was pretty clear.<\/p>\n
Now, they faced another problem: how to integrate the radio into the car itself.\u00a0 People couldn\u2019t drive around with a big wooden box radio in their backseat, so how could you fit a radio into a car?\u00a0 Well, as it turned out, the best answer was to split the radio up into several units. The receiver was mounted on the engine wall with wires from a control panel that was put on the steering column. \u00a0The speaker was also placed in a box and mounted into the dashboard.<\/p>\n
![\"car](\"https:\/\/www.davison.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/car-stereo-invention-300x200.jpg\" "\\"car")
Then, there was a problem with power.\u00a0 Radios used a lot of power, so a separate battery system had to be installed to power the radio (remember, a generator from the engine caused too much static) and these extra batteries were put in their own boxes under the seat or sunk in the floor.<\/p>\n
The last problem they faced was one of signal strength.\u00a0 Home radios were not mobile and stayed in the same place all the time, so they can lock in on and hold a signal.\u00a0 The car radio couldn\u2019t do this because as a car moves, so does the radio in that car.\u00a0 And because it was still the early days of radio, broadcast signals from the radio stations like RCA were really not that strong.\u00a0 So a moving car was like a moving target, going in and out of range all of the time. This problem was fixed by making the antennas bigger or longer and it was often placed as a mesh on the roof or as a thread under one of the running boards.<\/p>\n
So, our young inventors solved all of the problems they faced with perseverance and ingenuity, something all successful inventors have in common.\u00a0 They worked hard and created a working car radio.\u00a0 But, that\u2019s not the end of our story. No, as the story goes, our young inventors took their invention to a radio convention in Chicago.\u00a0 As chance would have it, they met Paul and Joseph Galvin, who owned a manufacturing company that made a device that allowed battery-powered radios to run on household AC current. The Galvan brothers immediately saw the potential of a mass-produced, affordable car radio and worked a deal with our inventors to start and manufacture car radios.<\/p>\n
![\"auto](\"https:\/\/www.davison.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/auto-stereo-invention-300x200.jpg\" "\\"auto")
So, they went to work and soon had a prototype car radio that they called the \u201c5T71\u201d. But the 5T71 wasn\u2019t a very appealing name and they wanted a name similar to many phonograph and radio businesses, which used the suffix \u201cola\u201d for their names (eg, Victrola).\u00a0 Since they were putting radios into motorized cars, their radios became \u201cMotorola,\u201d for motorized Victrola. So in 1930, Galvin Manufacturing introduced the first car radio as the \u201cMotorola.\u201d It was one of the first commercially successful car radios, and the first major product for the company that later became Motorola, Inc. \u00a0As we know now, Motorola went on to sell millions of car radios, and became an innovative leader in transistors, solid-state electronics, semi-conductors, televisions and cell phones.<\/p>\n
As our story ends, our inventors went on to fame and fortune and we all got the benefit of being able to listen to music or talk radio in our cars.\u00a0 And while we can\u2019t say that this story is absolutely true, it\u2019s nice to think that something we love and use every day may have started with a young woman who wanted to listen to music on a romantic summer\u2019s night in her boyfriend\u2019s car.\u00a0 If so, thank you young lady, whoever you are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We\u2019ve been listening to music in our cars for over 80 years; from the early days of simple AM radio to today\u2019s high-end digital audio setups.\u00a0 And, our sources have gotten pretty sophisticated as well.\u00a0 We used to get our radio signals from giant antennae on the ground.\u00a0 Now we have satellites beaming radio signals …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,39,15],"tags":[847,848,849,850,851,852,853,854,855,856,857],"class_list":["post-11991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured-invention","category-innovation-2","category-inventions","tag-a-car-stereo","tag-car-radio-invention","tag-car-stereo-radio","tag-in-car-radio","tag-radio-car","tag-radio-car-stereo","tag-radio-for-car","tag-radio-in-car","tag-stereo-car","tag-stereo-for-car","tag-the-car-radio"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n