Bill Lear

William Powell Lear (June 26, 1902 – May 14, 1978) was an American inventor and businessman.

He is best known for founding Learjet, a manufacturer of business jets.

He also invented the battery eliminator for the B battery and developed the car radio and the 8-track cartridge, an audio tape system.

Throughout his career of 46 years, Lear received over 140 patents.

Lear was born on June 26, 1902, in Hannibal, Missouri to Rueben Marion Lear, a carpenter, and Gertrude Elizabeth Powell Lear.

His mother left his father and he stayed with his aunt, Gussie Bornhouser, in Dubuque, Iowa.

Later, Otto Kirmse took him in and he became his stepson.

The family relocated to Chicago where Lear attended Kershaw Grammar School.

On Sundays, he attended the Moody Tabernacle (now Moody Church).

"From listening to Paul Rader, of the Moody Tabernacle, he learned grammar and how to speak. He found out how to meet people, how to shake hands, and what to say when he did so... He learned about hypocrisy, too", and ceased any further church affiliation.

While in Chicago, Lear was employed briefly at a local airfield.

He spent one summer with his father in Tulsa, re-building a Model-T car.

Too independent to move back with his mother in Chicago, Lear struck out traveling across the country.

He joined the U.S. Navy and was sent to Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Illinois.

After discharge, and with a young family, "he decided to complete his high school education. Starting a radio repair shop in his home, which he could tend nights, Lear enrolled at Tulsa Central High School, taking eight solid courses, heavy on the math. He was at the point of wrapping up the entire four-year curriculum in one, when he was again dismissed for showing up teachers."

Lear was self-taught: "He had read widely on wireless, including the works of Nikola Tesla, the scientist/inventor. He had even built a radio set, based on a twenty-five-cent Galena crystal which he sent away for and he had learned Morse code, the fun ending with the ban on radio which was implemented during World War I."

One of his first ventures was with Lawrence Sorensen, selling "Loose Coupler" radios.

He had been an "instructor in wireless" in the U.S. Navy so he confidently identified himself as a radio engineer to Clifford Reid in Quincy, Illinois.

Reid was selling auto supplies and hired Lear to expand into radio.

With contractor Julius Bergen, he founded Quincy Radio Labs and built speaker boxes for radios.

Lear also helped develop WLAL which evolved into the powerful station KVOO.

In 1924, he moved to Chicago and built a B-battery eliminator for the Universal Battery Company with R. D. Morey.

He met Waldorf Astoria Smith of the Carter Radio Company who helped him with radio theory including Ohm's law.

Tom Fletcher of the QRS Company was so impressed by Lear's radio set designed around a QRS rectifier tube that he hired him, offering 60% more pay than Universal Battery.

Bill Grunow of the Grigsby-Grunow-Hinds Company topped that offer when Lear fixed a problem with 60,000 B-battery eliminators that they had manufactured.

He came up with an invention in 1924 when power inverters installed at Stevens Hotel failed to perform for the Radio Manufacturers Association which became the Electronic Industries Alliance.

Lear also built audio amplifiers and cases for Magnavox speakers.

The Magnavox "majestic dynamic speakers" that he produced with Grunow were very popular.

Lear pioneered an early step toward the miniaturization of electronics.

Tuning coils in the radio frequency stage of a set were rather large; he reduced their size by using Litz wire, braided from many fine strands to create a large surface area, giving it high conductivity at radio frequency.

Lear borrowed $5,000 from his friend Algot Olson to build machines to wrap the strands, braid the wire, and wind the coils.

The industry was set up in the basement of his mother's old house on 65th street, and run with assistance of Don Mitchell, a railroad electrician.

Lear called the company Radio Coil and Wire Corporation.

Eugene F. McDonald of Zenith Electronics ordered 50,000 coils, which were one-quarter the size of coils made with solid wire.

Lear traded his business (Radio Coil) for one-third interest in Paul Galvin's Galvin Manufacturing Company.

At the time the radio had not yet been developed for use in automobiles.

Lear worked with his friend Elmer Wavering to build the first car radio.

Lear partnered with Howard Gates of Zenith; Lear designed the circuit and layout, Gates did the metal work and Lear completed the assembly.

Galvin initially dismissed the prototype, but later ordered a 200-unit production run.

Galvin and Lear mulled over names for the product on a cross-country trip and came up with "Motorola", which was a portmanteau of "motor" and the then popular suffix "-ola" used with audio equipment of the time (for example "Victrola").