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

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)