Inventing The Car Radio And 8-Track, Hiring A King As A Pilot, Designing Weird Steam Cars: Here’s The Story Of The Man Behind The Legendary Lear Jet

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Today, as you may have heard from your valet, the last Learjet was delivered to a customer, Northern Jet Management of Grand Rapids, Michigan. While I’m not exactly in the demographic of private jet owners (though preliminary research suggests The Autopian readership owns an average of 5.7 jets per person) I’m nevertheless familiar with Learjets because when I was growing up “Learjet” had become synonymous with rich-guy private jet travel, almost to the point of becoming genericized, like Kleenex or Xerox or Nintendo or asprin. But while this last Learjet is a big deal unto itself, what I find myself more fascinated by is the man behind the jet, Bill Lear. That’s because Bill Lear was involved in many more fascinating automotive-related ventures than I think is commonly known, and the man deserves more mainstream recognition. So let’s give him some.

The Learjet Was Based On An Aborted Swiss Fighter Plane

Okay, this isn’t the automotive part, but it’s part of the Learjet story about which I was not aware. The famous pointy-nosed fast luxury aircraft started out as a prototype Swiss fighter aircraft built by the comically-to-American-ears-named company Flug und Fahrzeugwerke Altenrhein (FFA). The airplane, called the FFA P-16, was intended to replace Switzerland’s piston-engined air fleet. The project began in 1952, with the goal of making a fast, close air support type of plane that was able to take off from short runways and land on unprepared fields if needed.

The first FFA P-16 flew in 1955, and while a small number of prototype planes were built and flown for a good number of flights (the second one completed 310 flights by 1958) the project was eventually terminated.

So, the P-16 never made it as a fighter, but the plane came to the attention of Bill Lear, who realized that a twin-engined adaptation of the aircraft could form the basis of a fast passenger jet, so in the late ’50s he formed the Swiss American Aircraft Corporation (not to be confused with the Franco-American Corporation, which produced ring-shaped pasta in cans, not aircraft) to develop the new jet.

By 1962 the company moved to Wichita, Kansas, and soon after became the Lear Jet Corporation.

One Of Learjet’s Early Test Pilots Was An Exiled King

I think the fact that the Learjet was derived from a fighter plane is pretty cool. But when it comes to just raw holy-shittitude, I don’t think that fact can hold a candle to this one: while the Learjet was being developed in Switzerland, one of the test pilots hired was King Michael I of Romania.

King Michael was actually pretty badass, as far as kings go, a group that overall just seems good at exploiting peasants and getting gout. In 1944, during WWII, King Michael arrested Hitler’s puppet ruler of Romania, Ion Antonescu, even though most assumed the King’s powers were ceremonial at best. The coup d’etat that the King perpetrated allowed Romania to exit the Axis powers and join the Allies, and most historians agree it shortened the war in the European theater by months, saving thousands of lives.

After the war, Romania’s Communist government, supported by the Soviet Union, saw King Michael as a threat and banished him. It was during this period of banishment, when the King was living in Switzerland, that he got a side gig as a test pilot for what would become the Learjet.

I wonder if the other pilots called him “Your Majesty” in the break room and gave him shit? It’d be really hard not to.

Lear Was On The Team That Invented Car Radios

This is the big one, right here, because having a radio in your car has been so ingrained in the fabric and culture of the automobile that it’s hard to imagine a time when car radios didn’t exist. But, of course, there was such a time, because in the early era of motoring, radios were huge, power-hungry things, fragile and ill-suited for installation in a car.

Elmer H. Wavering, along with Bill Lear worked with the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation to develop a viable radio for automotive use, experimental versions of which had been developed before, but nothing really adaptable for mass production. As part of the development team, Lear designed the circuit layout and did the final assembly of that first car radio, which was ready by 1930.

These early radios were still very bulky by modern standards, requiring multiple installations locations for the various components throughout the car as you can see here:

The name for the radio was decided by Lear and Paul Galvin (of Galvin Manufacturing Company, you see) while on a road trip. They combined the word “motor” with the suffix “ola” to get “Motorola,” which, of course, you’ve all heard of and which eventually became the new name of the Galvan Manufacturing Company.

You know what else is amazing to think about? That “ola” suffix was used because, for some reason, it was a really common suffix to use on company names at the time, which becomes startlingly obvious when you start to think about all of the companies and brands (some of which have entered the language as regular nouns) that end in -ola: Victrola, Crayola, Mazola, Shinola, and even freaking granola.

Lear Also Invented The 8-Track

If the car radio isn’t good enough for you, how about this to sweeten the pot: Lear also invented 8-track tapes. Now, sure, by modern standards 8-tracks are kind of a relic, with some compromises that would in no way be acceptable today, like switching tracks with a loud ker-chunk in the middle of a song, but at the time, these things were pretty revolutionary.

Though the Lear Jet company developed what we know as the 8-Track, much of the fundamental design was based on a 4-track tape loop cartridge system developed by Earl “Madman” Muntz. Muntz was known for consumer electronics, as you can see in this commercial:

…but he too has a fascinating automotive tie-in, as he was also the father of the fantastic Muntz Jet.

We’ll save the Muntz Jet story for another time. The 8-Track story owes much more to another carmaker, Ford, who in 1965 offered in-dash 8-track players across their lineup of cars, making the medium incredibly popular very quickly, since the 8-track was really the first widely available way to play recorded music easily in a car; in-dash phonograph players existed, but they were finicky and records were really too fragile for automotive use. Cassettes didn’t come to cars until 1968, so the easy-to-use and robust 8-track really should get the credit as the pioneer of recorded music in cars.

If we want to keep pushing it, the 8-track cartridge was one of the direct inspirations for video game console cartridges, so even recent consumer electronic devices like the Nintendo Switch owe a bit of (very) indirect thanks to Lear, too.

Lear Got Really Into Steam-Powered Vehicles Even Though They Were A Bust

Not everything Lear touched turned to gold, though. After selling his stake in Lear Jets, Lear was restless, and became very interested in the possibilities of a modern steam-powered car. He was researching turbines and an unusual piston engine layout known as a Napier Deltic engine, which had pairs of pistons in opposition inside of three cylinders arranged in an inverted triangle layout. It’s far easier to understand it visually:

 

Lear was planning to use a six-cylinder/12-piston version of this engine in an Indianapolis 500 car called the Lear Vapordyne, which was intended to run in the 1969 Indy 500:

The Lear car was an external-combustion engine like a normal steam engine, but instead of water Lear wanted to use a florinated hydrocarbon compound he called Learium, which he felt had better thermal qualities than water and provided a degree of lubrication. Learium was later found to be less inert than hoped, and was later abandoned in favor of water, which you may be familiar with as the liquid found in toilets.

Lear went through a lot of money and effort to develop this car, even going so far as to start building a replica of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in the Reno desert for testing purposes. In a 1969 interview with Sports Illustrated, here’s how Lear described it:

“I am building an exact duplicate of the Indianapolis Speedway right here,” Lear said. “I mean exact: It will be 2½ miles, all blacktopped, all banked the same, same curves and straights, same pits—everything. We will start practicing here March 1 with the steam race cars. And lest this sound too fancy, remember that it will be cheaper for us to practice here than to keep running back and forth to Indy with the cars and crews. Then, we will go to Indy with our shakedown completed.”

The track replica never got past just being scraped into the desert ground by a local grader, and some question if Lear ever really intended to build the whole thing.

The problem was Lear’s chief steam engine engineer, Ken Wallis, may have been something of a crank, designing engines that would have violated the laws of physics if they worked as intended, which they didn’t.

The Indy car never happened, but Lear pressed on, switching from steam piston engines to steam turbines, which he installed in two experimental vehicles: a Chevy Monte Carlo and a big GMC city bus.

The bus was part of an evaluation project for the US Department of Transportation, San Francisco’s Muni public transportation system and the Southern California public transportation system. A journalist who was at the demonstration in 1972 recounts his experience decades later:

The man in the turban withdrew from the growing steam cloud. And a screaming noise with what seemed like a much greater volume than the GE J-57 jet engines then being flown by the Nevada Air Guard’s RF-101s, howled. And howled. And howled louder. The cloud of steam, by then turning yellow, began emanating not only from the rear of the bus but from under it, all along its 32-foot length. The windows of the bus were now obscuring.

The howl of the turbine was piercing – a press release pegged the bus’ turbine idle RPM at over 50,000 – twice that of a modern jet engine’s. The orangish-yellow steam continued to build. I was becoming glad to have been excluded from the “ride-the-bus” press list.

Lear’s Vapor Turbine bus–which Lear claimed made 220 horsepower–was written up in several popular magazines, as was the turbine-powered Monte Carlo, which was a tight fit, as noted in Popular Mechanics:

“…space under the hood of the Monte Carlo is at a premium, with practically the whole frontal area of the car below the windshield being occupied by a huge condenser and fan shroud.”

These steam experiments didn’t really amount to anything, but they were certainly daring experiments very suited to their era, and even these late missteps shouldn’t diminish the significant contributions to the automotive world that Lear made. He really deserves to be a more commonly heard name in the automotive space.

So, yes, the last Learjet has been delivered. But every time you listen to music in your car, or jet somewhere in your private jet or fantasize about a resurgence of steam or even if you’re just a banished king looking for a fun side gig, you should remember Bill Lear.

 

(images: Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Wikimedia Commons, Bombadier-Learjet, Virtual Steam Museum, Hemmings, Hagerty, DrivenToWrite)

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Mercedes Streeter

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57 thoughts on “Inventing The Car Radio And 8-Track, Hiring A King As A Pilot, Designing Weird Steam Cars: Here’s The Story Of The Man Behind The Legendary Lear Jet”

  1. Yes keep posts like this coming. This is all bonkers but attempting to build a replica of Indianapolis Motor Speedway in Reno is the most bonkers.

  4. He is also the Lear in Lear Siegler seats, which did a lot of cool ’80s factory seats like those in the Mustang SVO, 3rd gen Firebird/Camaro, Grand National, etc.

  6. Most of the commercially produced 8-Track tapes (of the day) didn’t change tracks in the middle of a song. Not until the bootleggers hit the seen did this practice infect the media. The audio tracks were narrow and closely spaced limiting fidelity and often allowed crosstalk from adjacent audio tracks. Four track units were much better but limited in available recording time.

    My 2 cents,

  7. First comment on this site.

    I’ve spent decades restoring vintage electronics. ” Mad man Muntz” was a super interesting guy. He was a electronics engineer as well as a car salesman. He came up with the 4 track to…. sell more cars. he also sold Muntz TVs, radios and other electronics. One of the stories I heard about him was that he would routinely come around the engineering department and start snipping components. When the TV, radio or whatever else it was stopped working, he’d ask to have that last part put back in. He was super CHEAP. His TV sets were sold mainly in Southern California and would barely pick up local stations.

    Now… some comments about this site. Sorry but its SUPER buggy. That and you really need to do a audit of its accessibility. The fonts are WAYYY too small. That and it feels super cramped, almost old-fashioned. Like a throwback to a blog from 2005. It clearly doesn’t work well with auto caching because if you come to an article, log in, come back, well first of all there should be a redirect back to that article. Secondly, I have to repeatedly log in to finally get a form field to respond.

    Lastly…. I think you need to find some ways to differentiate the styling here from Jalopnik more. The graphics- other than color- are VERY similar.

    1. The design similarity is likely because I did the design for Jalopnik, and developed a visual style that I could execute very rapidly. It’s too streamlined for me to totally throw out! Besides, I developed it, so, dammit, I modified it and deployed it anew.

      1. BTW, I hope I did not offend you. I do overall like the direction the site seems to be heading

        Yeah I am well-aware of that and as a graphic designer myself- I get the desire to continue with what it familiar. Maybe its because I work as a graphic designer by trade I notice little things but to me its important to make sure that whatever you are working on, if its a different “property” that it have its own unique and easily identifiable styling. Yes- I know you made those graphics at Jalopnik. Hence why they look like…. Jalopnik.

        I’ve been at probably 10 different companies. Each and every one has their own branding standards: Illustration style, logos, colors, fonts, etc etc. Every time I leave one company and go to another obviously I don’t bring the previous company’s design assets with me… because those assets are tied to that brand.

        Now perhaps I am making a mountain out of a molehill. It appears Jalopnik is mainly using sort of boring stock photos for everything and over time, maybe people will associate your style here with ” Jalopnik Style” So its probably a moot point anyway.

        Now- I do want to give some positive feedback as well. I think you guys are doing a great job of delivering the kind of content that USED to be more common on Jalopnik. Whereas Jalopnik was turning more into just another run of the mill car site, you guys now provide a place where weird people like me who like weird cars and crap nobody gives a shit about can come hang out.

        Anyway, I’m usually pretty busy but if you guys ever need any FREE advice, my background is in web site UI, design, and so on. These things are always a work in progress as you’re probably well-aware so feel free to say howdy.

    2. Supposedly, that’s how he developed his first TV (he was also the first one to popularize “TV” as an abbreviation for “television”) – he bought an RCA television from a department store, and kept repeatedly disassembling and reassembling it in different combinations until he eliminated every component not vitally necessary to producing an image and picture. Mutz TVs were pretty janky and delivered mediocre picture quality and reception, but, in a time when TV sets were expensive luxury items, they were at least affordable – he was able to get his price down to 20% below the next cheapest TV on the market in the 1940s, and with a bigger screen.

  11. Saw the Muntz Jet car once in person; it is one of my all-time favorites.
    Fascinating story;
    With Torch you never know if he is making it up out of whole cloth until the end
    (Yes he is that good of a storyteller).

    Always good for a belly laugh; the line that got me the most this time was ‘toilet water’

  12. I believe that the legal requirements for adding the ‘ola’ suffix to your company name is to test whether or not the general public can differentiate your product from shit.

  13. Fun fact. If you folded back the wings of the FFA P-16, you could fold out other wing shapes. Even ones resembling a fork or a saw. Tucked neatly inside the fuselage was a tooth pick and a pair of tweezers.
    The instruments were also incredibly accurate. Finally, you could fly it on pedal power!

  14. I love the article and the history! I knew about the fighter jet thing, but the connection to the radio and Motorola was really interesting! Especially growing up in Chicago! Also, I cant wait for the write up on the Muntz Jet… I just saw the one that was in Rodders Journal go through auction… that thing is HOT.

  16. Fun -ola suffix trivia (and music, if not 8-track or car radio, related) — The name of the jukebox company Rock-ola is not a contraction of Rock’n’Roll and the ever-popular -ola suffix. Rockola was the actual, factual family name. The name of the company is hyphenated to get people to pronounce it correctly.

    1. That’s a great piece of party trivia, Laika. Here’s another fun fact: Rock-Ola was the primary contractor for producing M-1 carbines during WW2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock-Ola).
      At first, I thought this might have given rise to the practice of appending “-ola” to company names, but since Shinola was started 50 years before Rock-Ola, I bet the credit goes to the long-standing name recognition of the shoe-polish company instead.

  17. Fascinating article, Torch. I love stuff like this.
    But since the element is “flUorine”, the term you want is “fluorinated hydrocarbon” aka hydro-fluorocarbon compounds, or HFC’s. HFC’s replaced chloro-fluorocarbon compounds (CFC’s) as refrigerants for a while but are also being phased out in favor of less toxic alternatives (such as just plain hydrocarbons, or even carbon dioxide). Here’s a nice graphical explanation: https://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i33/Periodic-graphics-chemistry-air-conditioning.html

  18. “though preliminary research suggests The Autopian readership owns an average of 5.7 jets per person”

    I own zero jets. I feel left out now. I want a jet or a least a prop plane. Geez.

  20. He also won the 1949 Collier Trophy for his “development of the F-5 automatic pilot and automatic approach control coupler system”.

    The Collier Trophy is a big deal in the aviation and aerospace world. It’s given out for “the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America, with respect to improving the performance, efficiency, and safety of air or space vehicles, the value of which has been thoroughly demonstrated by actual use during the preceding year.”

    Bill Lear was presented his award by President Truman at the White House. The official photo is linked below:

    https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0257/3165/products/RSB67753_540bbd06-7971-4fa5-ba0e-b3300415f6b6_1200x.jpg

  22. “though preliminary research suggests The Autopian readership owns an average of 5.7 jets per person”

    Wow I’m definitely on the poor side. I only own 1.2 jets.

    And speaking of jets I can’t wait to read about the Muntz Jet.

    2. Me too re more on the Muntz Jet.

      When I saw the pic, I thought “Huh…that’s a Kurtis Sport Car, not a Muntz Jet?!”

      Turns out, yes on both…

  24. “which you may be familiar with as the liquid found in toilets.” Kind of surprised there wasn’t a link to an Idiocracy clip here. I think that all pop culture references should include helpful links until David gives in and starts watching TV and movies.

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