Bill Lear

Life

Lear was born in Hannibal, Missouri as an only child. He later moved with his family to Chicago, where he attended school up 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.

In the 1920s, Lear and a partner, Elmer Wavering, invented the first practical car radio, eventually selling their patents to the Galvin Corporation (which would later become the Motorola company). 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. His "LearAvian" series of portable radios, which incorporated radio direction finder circuits as well as broadcast band coverage, were especially popular.

In 1941, Lear married his fourth wife Moya Marie Olsen, daughter of Vaudeville comedian John "Ole" Olsen.

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 failing to convince 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.

Lear died of leukemia on May 14, 1978. At the time of his death, Lear's current project was the Model 2100 Learfan, a seven-passenger plane whose tail mounted propeller was powered by two turboprop engines.

Bill Lear and his wife, Moya, had four children: John, Shanda, David and Tina.

Innovations

Lear developed the Lear Jet Stereo 8-track music tape cartridge in 1964 as an improvement of the 4-Track Stereo-Pak tape cartridge (Fidelipak) marketed by Earl Muntz in California in 1962. 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.

One of Lear's most innovative projects was his last—a revolutionary airplane called the LearFan. The fuselage of this plane was made of lightweight composite materials instead of the standard aluminum material. It also featured an innovative "pusher" design, in which two aircraft engines powered a single spinning propeller blade that faced the rear of the aircraft.

The LearFan, though many years in development, was ultimately never completed. He begged his wife, Moya Lear, to finish it, and with the help of investors, she attempted to do so. But the plane failed to obtain FAA certification, and never made it into production. This was not due to FAA concern about its use of innovative materials; rather, because of concerns that even with two engines, the gear mechanism that powered the single propeller might fail. If it did, the plane would crash.

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