to expand into radio. With contractor Julius Bergen, he founded Quincy Radio Labs and built speaker boxes for radios. Lear also helped develop WLAL which evolved into the powerful station KVOO. In 1924, he moved to Chicago and built a B-battery eliminator for the Universal Battery Company with R. D. Morey. He met Waldorf Astoria Smith of the Carter Radio Company who helped him with radio theory including Ohm's law. Tom Fletcher of the QRS Company was so impressed by Lear's radio set designed around a QRS rectifier tube that he hired him, offering 60% more pay than Universal Battery. 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. He came up with an invention in 1924 when power inverters installed at Stevens Hotel failed to perform for the Radio Manufacturers' Association. Lear also built audio amplifiers and cases for Magnavox speakers. The Magnavox "majestic dynamic speakers" that he produced with Grunow were very popular. Lear pioneered an early step toward miniaturization in electronics. Tuning coils in the radio frequency stage of a set were rather large; Lear reduced their size by using Litz wire, braided from many fine strands to create a large surface area, giving it high conductivity at radio frequency. Lear borrowed $5,000 from his friend Algot Olson to build machines to wrap the strands, braid the wire, and wind the coils. The industry was set up in the basement of his mother's old house on 65th street, and run with assistance of Don Mitchell, a railroad electrician. Lear called the company Radio Coil and Wire Corporation. Eugene F. McDonald of Zenith Electronics ordered 50,000 coils, which were one-quarter the size of coils made with solid wire. Lear traded his Radio Coil business for one-third interest in Paul Galvin's Galvin Manufacturing Company. At that time the radio had not yet been developed for use in automobiles. Lear worked with his friend Elmer Wavering to build the first car radio. Lear partnered with Howard Gates of Zenith; Lear designed the circuit and layout, Gates did the metal work, and Lear completed the assembly. Galvin initially dismissed the prototype, but later ordered a 200-unit production run. Galvin and Lear mulled over names for the product on a cross-country trip and came up with "Motorola", which was a portmanteau of "motor" and the then popular suffix "-ola"