​Subject: Three part series on why Heisen​b​erg was wrong and our scientists were right

History of the Car radio - GREAT STORY!

THIS IS A GREAT STORY !!

HISTORY OF 
THE CAR RADIO 
Seems like cars have always had radios, 
but they didn't. 
 
 Here's the 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 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 easy: 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, with 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 the first 
handheld two-way radio 
-- The Handy-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 for under $200. 
 
In 1956 the company introduced the world's first pager; in 1969 came 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 manufacturers 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!!

Landing On The Moon -- 5/11/23

Today's encore selection -- from Team Moon: How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon by Catherine Thimmesh. With alarms sounding and fuel running out, Neil Armstrong came within seconds of crashing the Apollo 11 landing module:

"BAM! Suddenly, the master alarm in the lunar mod­ule rang out for attention with all the racket of a fire bell going off in a broom closet. 'Program alarm,' astronaut Neil Armstrong called out from the LM ('LEM') in a clipped but calm voice. 'It's a "twelve-oh-two."'

"'1202,' repeated astronaut Buzz Aldrin. They were 33,500 feet from the moon.

"Translation: We have a problem! What is it?

"Do we land? Do we abort? Are we in danger? Are we blowing up? Tell us what to do. Hurry!

"In Mission Control, the words TWELVE OH TWO tumbled out of the communications loop. The weight of the problem landed with a thud in the lap of twenty-six-year-old Steve Bales. Bales, call name GUIDO, was the mission con­troller for guidance and navigation.

"A moment earlier (after some worries with navigation problems), Bales had relaxed with a deep breath, thinking at last: We're going to make it. Now, wham! His mind, again sent rac­ing; his blood rushing; his heart fluttering; his breath -- still as stone. But he wasn't alone.

"A voice on another loop -- belonging to one of Bales's backroom support guys, twenty-four-year-old computer whiz kid Jack Garman -- burst in to make sure Bales was aware of the 1202. A quick glance at a master list told them a 1202 was executive overflow. Simply put, the computer had too much to do. But program alarms, as Garman knew firsthand, were built into the computer solely to test the software. By their very definition, they weren't alarms that should happen in flight. (During development, these alarms were testing computing cycles.)

"Yet there it was: 1202. An unreal reality. First, stunned inactivity at Steve Bales's console.

"Then, a bombardment of thoughts: What's the problem? Do they land? Do they abort? Are they in danger? Are they blowing up? Tell them what to do. Hurry!

"Bales scoured his guidance and navigation data. Searching. Sifting. Sorting.

"Flight Director Kranz plucked details from a flood of incoming information. 

"Juggling. Judging.

"Backroom guy Jack Garman (call name AGC) consulted his handwritten program alarm list, mandated by Gene Kranz (and neatly stashed beneath the Plexiglas on his console).

"CapCom Charlie Duke (or Capsule Communicator, the voice link between Mission Control and the spacecraft) mused aloud: 'It's the same one we had [in the simulator].'

"And indeed, in one of the very last simulations, or practice sessions, before liftoff of Apollo 11, mission controllers found themselves stumped when faced with a sim­ilar program alarm. While training with the backup crew, SimSup Jay Honeycutt (or Simulation Supervisor) had asked software expert Jack Garman to concoct some sort of computer glitch for the controllers to solve. So Garman remembered the hidden software testing alarms and threw out one of those. It wasn't a 1202, but a similar type -- one that supposedly should never happen in actual flight (because the situ­ations that would trigger those alarms had presumably already been removed from the software).

"During that simulation, that test, GUIDO Steve Bales had called for an abort -- an immediate end to the landing. They stopped the pretend -- land on the moon. But it was the wrong call. While the computer was definitely having difficulties, it would still have been safe to continue the landing because the LM's criti­cal functions were still working.

"'And so [Flight Director] Gene Kranz, who's the real hero of that situation, sat us all down and said, "You WILL document every single program alarm, every single possible one that can happen" and what we should do about it if it happens,' recalled AGC Jack Garman, explaining how they ended up with a written record of those 'nonexistent' program alarms.

"Sometimes, after the bugs have all been removed during development, programmers might go back in and remove all their testing alarms. But often, it's considerably more efficient (and cheaper) to just leave them buried unseen, deep down in the software.

"'So I remember,' continued Jack Garman, 'going back to my little corner with my friends -- my col­leagues -- and we wrote them all down. Wrote them on a sheet of paper (twenty or thirty of these alarms that were not supposed to happen), taped this list to a piece of cardboard, and stuck it under­neath the Plexiglas on the console.'

"As they would discover later, though it seemed an impossible situation, it wasn't a false alarm. Executive overflow meant the computer was too busy. And the computer was too busy (it turned out) because a switch had been mistakenly left on.

"'Give us a reading on the 1202 program alarm,' said Armstrong from the lunar module as it contin­ued its rapid -- and very real -- descent to the moon.

"'The astronauts had no idea what these alarms were,' explained Garman. 'Absolutely no idea. These alarms were software development alarms. They'd never seen them. Never studied them. Never had them. No one in Mission Control knew what they were, not Kranz or anybody.'

"GUIDO Steve Bales determined the computer had not lost track of the LM's altitude or speed -- critical for avoiding a lunar crash -- and still had its guidance control, also essential. Flight Director Gene Kranz determined, with input from his controllers, that all other systems were functioning within acceptable parameters. AGC Jack Garman concluded that as long as the alarm didn't recur, they were okay.

"Garman prompted GUIDO Steve Bales, who gave the 'Go' to Flight Director Kranz, who in turn gave the command to CapCom Charlie Duke. CapCom relayed the message to Armstrong and Aldrin. 'We are Go on that alarm,' he told Neil and Buzz and the hundreds of others listening in on the loops. Not more than twenty seconds had passed from the time the 1202 was first called out.

"'Program alarm!' Buzz responded from the LM. 'Same one.'

"Garman clarified to Bales that as long as the alarm was not constant -- not continuous -- they were okay. The rest of Bales's information looked good. He told the Flight Director, 'We’re Go.' Kranz 'went around the horn' -- polling his controllers for their status reports -- they were all 'Go.' Kranz told his voice link to the astronauts, 'CapCom, we are Go for landing.'

"Aldrin acknowledged the good-to-Go. They were 3,000 feet from the moon now. 'Program alarm!' Buzz called. '1201.'

"'When it occurred again a few minutes later,' Jack Garman recalled, 'a different alarm but it was the same type ... I remember distinctly yelling -- by this time yelling, you know, in the loop here -- "SAME TYPE" [in other words, Hang tight!] and he [GUIDO Steve Bales] yells "SAME TYPE!" I could hear my voice echoing. Then the CapCom says, "SAME TYPE!" Boom, boom, boom, going up.'

"Their voices were rapid-fire. Crisp. Assured. There was no hesitation. But you could practically hear the adrenaline rushing in their vocal tones, practically hear the thumping of their hearts as the alarms continued to pop up.

"Then the Eagle was down to 2,000 feet. Another alarm! 1202. Mission Control snapped, Roger, no sweat. And again, 1202! Then the Eagle was down to 700 feet, then 500. Now, they were hovering -- helicopter-like -- presumably scouting a landing spot.

"In hundreds of practice simulations, they would have landed by now. But Mission Control couldn't see the perilous crater and boulder field confronting Neil and Buzz. Those things, coupled with the distraction of the alarms, had slowed them down.

"More than eleven minutes had passed since they started down to the moon. There was only twelve minutes' worth of fuel in the descent stage."

Team Moon How 400000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon
 
author: Catherine Thimmesh  
title: Team Moon: How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon  
publisher: Houghton Mifflin Books for Children  
date: Copyright 2006 Catherine Thimmesh  
page(s): 18-24  
Team Moon How 400000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon