Motorola: Battery Eliminators, a Moon Transceiver and the StarMax Feud

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Motorola began in 1928 in Chicago as the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation, founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin. Its first product was a battery eliminator that let radios built for direct current run from new household AC outlets instead of leaky acid batteries. In 1930 it sold its first car radio for $30 to a customer in Indiana and began equipping police cars in Evanston and Cook County. Paul Galvin coined the brand by adding "ola" to "motor," and the company became Motorola Inc. in 1947. World War II brought the SCR-536 handheld radio and research director Dan Noble, and in 1969 a Motorola transceiver carried Neil Armstrong's voice from the Moon. In 1974 it sold its television business to Panasonic's parent to focus on chips, and its 32-bit MC68000 processor powered machines from Apple, Commodore, Atari, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.

Martin Cooper made the first handheld mobile phone call in New York in 1973, and the DynaTAC 8000X won FCC approval in 1983. By 1998 phones were two-thirds of revenue, yet Motorola clung to analog while Europe moved to digital GSM, falling behind Ericsson in 1996 and Nokia in 1998. Its StarMax Mac clone died when Steve Jobs released Mac OS 8, sidestepping licenses written for System 7, and the 66-satellite Iridium project drained billions. The RAZR and the "Hello Moto" campaign brought a mid-2000s revival, but after the iPhone Motorola lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009 as engineers left for Apple. On January 4, 2011, it split into Motorola Solutions and Motorola Mobility, which Google bought in 2012 and sold to Lenovo in 2014.

• A heated call between Steve Jobs and CEO Christopher Galvin ended the clone contract, and Apple demoted Motorola from favored processor supplier.
• Apple and IBM pushed Motorola out of a major processor manufacturing alliance for a time after the clone fight.
• The 1955 batwing M logo is built from a sine wave and a triangle wave, a drawing of a radio signal.
• In Scottsdale, Arizona, Motorola and a local water company were identified as sources of TCE contamination that brought a three-day water ban for almost 5,000 people.
• By 2010 Greenpeace ranked Motorola highly for cutting PVC, and it made phone housings from recycled water cooler bottles.