AV8NLVR's Blog

What do car radios, 8-track tapes, and Learjets have in common?

They were all invented by the same person - Mr. William Lear!  As an American inventor, Lear spent almost all his adult life coming up with new ideas and making them reality.

His first big idea was to create a way that a big vacuum tube radio could be used in an automobile.  He did this back in the late 1920s before the age of 30, back when automobiles were rather simple.  This was tied to the invention of another man, Robert Galvin, who came up with a way to power such a radio from standard current instead of batteries.  Lear sold his patent to Galvin and in 1930 the Galvin brothers introduced the first practical radio for the automobile, which sold for a little over $100.  In honor of this major invention Galvin Manufacturing decided to re-name the company, combining "motor" and "Victrola" to create "Motorola".

In the 1930s, Lear used the profits to start his own company to make electronics for aircraft.  Over the next 30 years, he came up with things like the first autopilot (the "Learmatic Navigator"), first fully automatic landing system that could allow pilots to land in zero visibility, direction finders, and the first radios for aircraft.  In 1962 he sold this business to Siegler and it became known as "Lear-Siegler", a major manufacturer of airplane electronics.

Lear realized the potential for a small jet that would make business travel affordable and started a new company which built the "Learjet" from his design, the world's first mass-produced business jet.  It first flew in 1963 and is still being manufactured today as a division of Bombardier Aerospace in Canada.

The 8-track tape idea came from the need to create a convenient entertainment system for the Learjet that could handle the bumps of air turbulence.  Lear started with the 4-track system which itself was created by another big name in audio, Earl Muntz, and took it to the next level.  The 8-track was immediately successful and by 1965, Ford was offering built-in 8-track players and the first pre-recorded cartridges.  By their peak in the late 70s, 8-track players and cartridges were an $8 Billion per year industry.

Lear had another idea for an even bigger jet which he designed in 1969 and called the "LearStar 600".  In 1976, he sold the exclusive rights to build this plane to the Canadair company, which then named the production version the "CL-600 Challenger".  In 1990 Canadair was sold to Bombardier which still makes the Challenger 600 today - it became another popular business jet.  But Lear's original design for the 600 has yet another legacy.  In the early 90s, Bombardier used the CL-600 as the base design for what they would name the "Canadair Regional Jet".  That's right.  Today's CRJ which is flown by several major airlines (Northwest Airlink, Delta Connection, Skywest, etc) is a direct descendant of Lear's design.  The reason why the windows in a CRJ are somewhat uncomfortably low is because this plane is merely a stretched version of the large business jet and the floor had to be raised to accommodate wiring and other things.

He died in 1978 of Leukemia at the age of 76 after a lifetime of inventing new things which touched nearly everyone's life.  But you know what the real irony is?  William Lear had no formal education beyond the 8th grade.