He designed award-winning record album covers but in the middle of a successful career as a graphics designer and photographer, Neil Terk decided to take a left turn into the consumer electronics industry, founding a company that became the most recognizable name in radio and TV antennas.
A native New Yorker, Terk was born on December 5, 1947 in Manhattan, but grew up in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens. After attending P.S. 164, Terk spent grades 7-12 at the now-defunct Rhodes Prep school in Manhattan. He majored in architecture at Temple University for a year before transferring to the Philadelphia College of Art (PCA), and was graduated with a degree in industrial design.
After a brief tenure in Zurich where he became a convert to the Bauhaus design philosophy, he sent out a resume consisting of a glossy nude of himself with a dollar bill glued across his private parts and his accomplishments pasted on the flip side. This unusual self-advertisement got him a job designing photo equipment in New Jersey.
A year later, Terk got a job as creative director for Chess Janus Records in 1972. He designed more than 500 album covers including Cosmic Slop by Funkadelic, Big Bad Bo by Bo Diddley, Music to Make Love By by Solomon Burke, and Making Music by Dire Straits, as well as albums from Chuck Berry, Etta James, Aretha Franklin and Bob Marley.
In the mid-1970s, Terk founded two design companies: Paper Faces, where he designed and created composite sheets and catalog books for large fashion model agencies including Ford, Elle and Wilhelmina, and, Neil Terk & Co., a production company. He also worked as a consultant to such companies as Pepsi, Playtex and Blimpie, designing logos, packaging, catalogs, point-of-purchase materials and store interiors. When computer-based desktop publishing came into vogue, Terk sold the companies.
In 1985, Cobra approached Terk about distributing a new FM antenna the Italian company planned on selling in the U.S. Terk convinced Cobra if the antenna looked better, it would sell better. Cobra agreed. Terk applied his experience in modern industrial design and reworked the antenna under the auspices of the new Terk Technologies.
When this re-designed antenna sold well, Terk realized he'd found his calling. His goal was to design antennas so beautiful that consumers would be eager to display them. Two years later, Terk unveiled the company's first product, the Terk Pi AM/FM antenna. The two-piece Pi was the better mouse trap of radio antennas. Its outer six-inch adjustable diameter directional loop AM antenna combined with a concentric fixed disk FM antenna, and included an amplifier to help boost weak radio signals and a noise-free transistor. This unique physical and technical configuration represented a departure from old-fashioned rabbit ears.
The powerful Pi - the Greek letter for determining the circumference of a circle - could pull in signals from radio stations as far as 50 miles away. The Pi was as successful commercially as it was technically and aesthetically, selling in the hundreds of thousands. Not only did the Pi fulfill Terk's technical and design goals, it was so beautiful it was selected to be sold through the Museum of Modern Art in 1988. To better handle masses of nearby signals in urban areas, Terk later unveiled the $20 FM+.
Over the next 14 years, Terk created and sold indoor and outdoor antennas for HDTV and analog TV, XM satellite radio, Lojack, in-car cell, DirecTV, as well as a full line of installation hardware products and kits and the Leapfrog wireless multi-room A/V distribution and control systems. By the mid 1990s, Terk's sales reached $50 million. In 1997, Terk moved his company to Hauppauge Industrial Park.
Also an innovator, Terk created new CE categories that solved problems such as the Volume Regulator, which kept TV volume of normally louder commercials at the same volume as regular programming, while taking interior design into consideration. This successful combination of form and function heavily influenced other gadget makers. Terk also was involved in the industry, serving on the CEA executive board, its board of directors, and as chairman for both the Accessories Division and Antenna Subdivision.
In 2001, Terk sold half interest in his company to Topspin, a venture capital firm. A few months later, the non-smoker Terk was diagnosed with lung cancer and passed away in 2003. Terk Technologies is now a subsidiary of Audiovox.