1. William Powell Lear was an American inventor and businessman.
32 Facts About Bill Lear
2.
Bill Lear is best known for founding Learjet, a manufacturer of business jets.
3.
Bill Lear invented the battery eliminator for the B battery, and developed the car radio and the 8-track cartridge, an audio tape system.
4.
Bill Lear's mother left his father and he stayed with his aunt, Gussie Bornhouser, in Dubuque, Iowa.
5.
Bill Lear found out how to meet people, how to shake hands, and what to say when he did so.
6.
Bill Lear spent one summer with his father in Tulsa, re-building a Model-T car.
7.
Too independent to move back with his mother in Chicago, Bill Lear struck out cross country.
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William Powell 8.
Bill Lear joined the US Navy and was sent to Great Lakes Naval Training Station.
9.
Bill Lear was at the point of wrapping up the entire four-year curriculum in one, when he was again dismissed for showing up teachers.
10.
Bill Lear had been an "instructor in wireless" in the US Navy so he confidently identified himself as a radio engineer to Clifford Reid in Quincy, Illinois.
11.
Reid was selling auto supplies and hired Bill Lear to expand into radio.
12.
Bill Lear helped develop WLAL which evolved into the powerful station KVOO.
13.
Bill Lear met Waldorf Astoria Smith of the Carter Radio Company who helped him with radio theory.
14.
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.
15.
Bill Lear came up with an invention in 1924 when power inverters installed at Stevens Hotel failed to perform for the Radio Manufacturers' Association.
16.
Bill Lear borrowed $5,000 from his friend Algot Olson to build machines to wrap the strands, braid the wire, and wind the coils.
17.
Bill Lear traded his Radio Coil business for one-third interest in Paul Galvin's Galvin Manufacturing Company.
18.
Bill Lear worked with his friend Elmer Wavering to build the first car radio.
19.
In 1931, Bill Lear bought his first aircraft, a Fleet biplane for $2,500 from a woman in Dearborn, Michigan.
20.
Bill Lear founded Bill Lear Developments, a company specializing in aerospace instruments and electronics.
21.
Bill Lear developed radio direction finders, autopilots, and the first fully automatic aircraft landing system.
22.
Bill Lear was awarded the Collier Trophy for this contribution in 1949.
23.
Bill Lear developed and marketed a line of panel-mounted radios for general aviation.
24.
Bill Lear rebranded again in 1944 to Lear, Incorporated and in 1949 opened a manufacturing facility in Santa Monica, California.
25.
In 1960, Bill Lear moved to Switzerland and founded the Swiss American Aviation Company.
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William Powell 26.
Bill Lear next moved to Wichita, Kansas, to manufacture the converted SAAC 23 design.
27.
The Bill Lear Fan was ultimately never completed; at the time of his death Bill Lear asked his wife, Moya, to finish it.
28.
Bill Lear's invention was an improvement on 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.
29.
In 1965, a partnership between Ford, RCA, and Bill Lear offered the first pre-recorded 8-track music cartridges.
30.
In 1968, Bill Lear started work on a closed circuit steam turbine to power cars and buses.
31.
Bill Lear built a transit bus, and converted a Chevrolet Monte Carlo sedan to use this turbine system.
32.
The 75-year-old Bill Lear died of leukemia in Reno, Nevada on May 14,1978.