Motorola
Most people would consider parking your car at the curb and cranking up the radio rude or worse. But when Paul Galvin did it in 1930, it was brilliant guerilla marketing.
When Galvin founded his Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in 1928, the timing could not have been worse. The Chicago company had early success with its “battery eliminator,” which allowed radio owners to run their sets on household current, but the stock market crash of 1929 threw the continued existence of Galvin’s enterprise into serious doubt.
Searching for a new product to revitalize his company, Galvin learned that some auto shops were doing makeshift installations of radios in customers’ cars. Galvin realized that a radio made specifically for cars, easy to install and insulated from interference, could be a winner. He rushed his staff to work on the project, and they produced a working model just in time for the 1930 Radio Manufacturers Association convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Unfortunately, Galvin lacked the funds to rent a booth at the convention, so he had his engineers rig an external speaker to the radio mounted in his own Studebaker, drove to the convention, parked out front, and cranked up the volume. A crowd quickly gathered, and as Galvin pitched his product his wife took down the names of distributors interested in selling the radios.
One hurdle now remained — what to call the gizmo? Gavin polled his team of designers, and they quickly settled on “Motorola,” combining a sense of “motion” from “moto” with “sound” from the suffix “ola,” well-known in the trade names of “Victrola” phonographs and “Pianola” player pianos.
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