William Powell Lear

Co-founder of Motorola, founder of Lear Jet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Lear

William "Bill" Powell Lear (June 26, 1902 – May 14, 1978) was an American inventor and businessman. He is best known for founding the Lear Jet Corporation, a manufacturer of business jets. He also invented the first car radio and developed the 8-track cartridge, an audio tape system which was widely used in the 1960s and 1970s.

Early life

Lear was born in Hannibal, Missouri as an only child. He later moved with his family to Chicago, where he attended school until the eighth grade. He enlisted in the United States Navy during World War I, serving as a radio operator. Lear had no formal education past the eighth grade other than the courses which he took in the Navy.

Faithless to fearless

William Powell Lear, the only child of Reuben Marion and Gertrude Elizabeth (Powell) Lear, was born on June 26, 1902, in Hannibal, Missouri. He endured a lonely, miserable and unstable childhood. After his mother and father separated when he was 6 years old, he lived in Chicago with his mother, who was both verbally and physically abusive to him, causing him to feel "faithless and worthless."

"My father's mother, Gertrude, was a Bible-thumping, tyrannical, child-beating, flaming redheaded bitch," Bill Lear Jr. said frankly.

He said he understood why his father would later run away from home, particularly after he spent a horrid three-week summer vacation with his grandmother, when he was 8. He described the conditions as "appalling." There wasn't running water or electricity, and he recalls the stench from a slop-bucket the pigs ate from, which was kept on the floor next to the kitchen sink.

Bill Lear took refuge from his mother reading books about electricity. By age 12, he had built a radio set with earphones, mastered Morse code, and had pieced together a crude telegraph. He later said Horatio Alger books helped him go from faithless to fearless.

"It was always situations where the young man had no real reason to expect opportunities in life," he said of what he read. "He always found opportunities by virtues of his willingness to 'do and to dare.' This was a physiological stimulus for someone in my position, as my mother was always trying to drill it into me that I would never be anything: Once a poor boy, always a poor boy."

Reading Tom Swift adventure stories helped him decide to drop out of high school, after attending eighth grade for only eight weeks. He didn't need school; he knew more about electronics than his teachers did.

He took odd jobs, mostly working with electronics, and at 18, he joined the Navy for six months and became a wireless instructor. After WWI, Lear learned how to fly; he applied his knowledge of electronics to aviation.

Inventor

In the 1920s, Lear and a partner, Elmer Wavering, invented the first practical car radio, calling it "Motorola" (a combination of motor and Victrola). The two couldn't afford the booth fees at an automobile trade show to advertise their new invention, so they parked outside of the convention center's parking lot and played the radio from their car, attracting orders as people walked by. They eventually sold their patents to Paul Galvin of the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation (which would later become Motorola). In 1930, Lear used his profits from the sale of his car radio patents to found Lear Developments, a company specializing in aerospace instruments and electronics. Lear developed radio direction finders, autopilots, and the first fully automatic aircraft landing system. Lear also developed and marketed a line of panel-mounted radios for general aviation. His "LearAvian" series of portable radios, which incorporated radio direction finder circuits as well as broadcast band coverage, were especially popular.

Lear changed the name of Lear Developments to Lear Incorporated and in 1949 opened a manufacturing facility in Santa Monica, California.

In 1960, Lear moved to Switzerland and founded the Swiss American Aviation Company. In 1962 he sold Lear Incorporated to the Siegler Corporation after having failed to persuade its board to go into the aircraft manufacturing business. That company thereafter was known as Lear Siegler. Bill Lear next moved to Wichita, Kansas to manufacture the Lear Jet. On October 7, 1963, Lear Jet started test flights on the Learjet 23, the first mass produced business jet.

Innovations

Lear developed the Lear Jet Stereo 8 music cartridge in 1964, better-known as the "8-track". This was an eight track variation of the four track Muntz Stereo-Pak tape cartridge, marketed by Earl "Madman" Muntz in California in 1962, itself a version of a 3-track system, Fidelipac. The 8-track was a commercial success that had good audio quality and was easily adapted to vehicle and home use. It was a solution to the need for a convenient music source for his new business jets. The consumer version of players for these tapes first appeared in September 1965 in 1966 model Ford automobiles with RCA and Lear offering the first pre-recorded Stereo 8 Music Cartridges.

The successful Canadair Regional Jet is largely based on Lear's design for the LearStar 600, which Canadair bought and turned into the Canadair CL-600 Challenger business jet. Lear Jet was acquired in 1990 by Bombardier Aerospace.

In 1968, Lear also started work on a closed circuit steam turbine to power cars and buses, and built a transit bus and converted a Chevrolet Monte Carlo sedan to use this turbine system.[citation needed] It used a proprietary working fluid dubbed "Learium", possibly a chlorofluorocarbon similar to DuPont Freon.

In 1969 Lear, and his friend Art Linkletter, offered their support for Craig Breedlove's supersonic car project.

In the early 1970s, Lear backed the Foxjet ST600 with its first order. The Very Light Jet project failed, but the VLJ concept became popular again 30 years later.

One of Lear's most innovative projects was his last — a revolutionary aircraft called the LearAvia Lear Fan 2100, a seven-passenger aircraft whose single pusher propeller was powered by two turbine engines. The fuselage of this aircraft was made of lightweight composite materials, instead of the more typical aluminum alloys. Though many years in development, the Lear Fan was ultimately never completed. At the time of his death he begged his wife, Moya, to finish it; with the help of investors, she attempted to do so, but the aircraft failed to obtain FAA certification and never made it into production.

Personal life

Lear had a total of seven children, born from 1925 to 1954. With his first wife, Ethel Peterson Lear, Mary Louise was born January 1925. He married his second wife Madeline Murphy in October 1926. Their son, Bill Lear, Jr., was born on May 24, 1928. His third marriage to Margret Radell was childless. In 1941, Lear married his fourth wife Moya Marie Olsen, daughter of Vaudeville comedian John "Ole" Olsen. Bill and Moya Lear would have four children together: John Olsen Lear was born in 1942, Shanda in 1944, David in 1948 and Tina in 1954. Lear's son John is an accomplished pilot and renowned ufologist.

Although he had a reputation of being difficult, Lear reportedly had a good sense of humor, as evidenced by naming his second daughter Shanda (~"chandelier").

The 75-year-old Lear died of leukemia in Reno, Nevada on May 14, 1978. His remains were cremated and scattered at sea.

Tributes and honors

1972, Elliott Cresson Medal

1974, Tony Jannus Award for his distinguished contributions to aviation.

1978, National Aviation Hall of Fame

2003, Hannibal Municipal Airport was renamed the Hannibal Regional Airport, William P. Lear Field in his honor.

Learisms

On aerodynamics: "If it looks good, it will fly good."

On management: "If you put up half of the money, you get to make half of the decisions."

On electronics: "There's only one thing worse than an intermittent, that's an intermittent intermittent."

On weight reduction in the Learjet: "I'd sell my grandmother to save one pound."