The car radio turns 90 this year.

By
Ron Robinson
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A history of that thing in your dashboard.

By Alan Cross for Global News
Posted June 28, 2020
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Car radios first appeared 90 years ago. But as Alan Cross explains, they looked a little different than this. . Global News
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When you get into a car, what’s the first thing you do after fastening your seatbelt? You look for some entertainment. And for 90 years, we’ve been reaching for the radio for our mobile music, news, sports, and entertainment.

Listening to the radio (or some other form of audio entertainment) is one of the few things we can do while driving. No wonder in-vehicle listening is so important to the industry.

Here’s the backstory of that trusty thing in your dashboard.

Radio in the car is almost as old as the automobile itself. As far back as 1904, American inventor Lee DeForest (who later came up with the audion tube, which made radio practical) was demonstrating how this technology could be used in cars when he showed up in St. Louis at the Louisana Purchase Exposition. DeForest was a bit ahead of his time; no one had successfully figured out how to broadcast anything but morse code to this point. It would be another half-decade before speech and music could be transmitted wirelessly and another ten years before someone figured out how to get a radio to work in the car.

By 1920, vacuum tubes — which DeForest had a hand in inventing — were sufficiently robust that a few people made serious attempts at putting a radio in a car. There were all sorts of issues: mismatched voltages, electric interference from the engines, the heat generated by the tubes, and the size of the installation itself.

But the prospect of having tunes in the car pushed inventors forward. People recall George Frost, an 18-year-old radio fan from Chicago, who is said to have attached a radio to the passenger door of his Ford Model T in 1922. It was a jury-rigged solution, but it apparently worked.

Around the same time, Chevrolet offered an after-market radio option for $200, which is about $3,000 today. The antenna was bulky — it took up most of the roof — as did the radio itself, taking away a substantial amount of room for passengers. “The installation of this equipment in the Chevrolet car is so simple we may expect to see many cars similarly equipped in the future,” wrote The Literary Digest in September 1922. By 1926, custom-installed radios were a thing, but only for the well-off.

Read more  HERE.

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1 COMMENT

  1. Ive been driving truck since May 22 1974. Local , long distance , and for three years 5 nights a week from PoCo to Seattle and back. The reception in the BC interior was never very good but the drive to Seattle was great. I would listen to NW till it dropped off then KIRO for talk and Danny Holiday for tunes. I cant imagine all these years without a radio. Ive owned a couple of my own trucks. One of them the plastic that showed what you were tuned in to fell off. It didnt matter because I drove locally and never would have dreamed of changing the station.
    Frosty, Rafe, Good, Warren, Berner, Mcrea it didnt get any better

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