Over seven decades since the Galvin Manufacturing Corp. was created, Paul Galvin, a self-educated and twice-failed businessman and his offspring have built Motorola into an engineering company with landmark training programs and generous resources for engineers. Since 1928, Motorola has reinvented itself many times building car radios, solid state devices for televisions, cellular phones, integrated circuits and chips and even a global telecommunications satellite system.

The founding brothers, Paul and Joseph Galvin, were born in Harvard, Illinois. They believed automobiles and radio would provide a lucrative market for storage batteries and in 1921, formed the Stewart Battery Company that failed two years later. They then built "battery eliminators," a soon-obsolete device that adapted battery-operated radios to household current.

William Lear teamed with Galvin in 1934, and successfully developed the automobile dashboard radio they named the "Motorola," the motorized Victrola. Galvin demonstrated the prototype model in his Studebaker. Motorola produced millions of car radios, followed by two-way radio systems for police and fire services.

World War II began the quest to miniaturize electronics technology as well as an insatiable demand for radios. Galvin authorized a research team to design the world's first two-way portable radio--a 5-pound AM device dubbed the "handie-talkie." By 1945 Motorola had manufactured 130,000 walkie-talkies, the precursor of cellular phones, pagers and radio modems.

In the 1950s, Motorola manufactured the first portable television sets and home audio systems. Galvin joined by his son, Robert and Daniel Noble, created a research park that examined the commercial potential of transistors and solid state electronics and from there, semi-conductors and silicon. Motorola developed the first automotive alternator leading to advanced applications today. Christopher Galvin continues the family legacy as the third Galvin to be named chairman of Motorola.