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William "Bill"
Halligan was born in Boston in 1899 and grew up fascinated with the
miracle of radio. As a boy, he eagerly devoured every scientific
journal and book on the subject that he could lay his hands on, and by
the age of 16 was working as a wireless operator on an excursion
boat. During World War I, he served as radioman on a mine layer
working off of the coast of Scotland.
After the war, Halligan attended the
electrical
engineering school at Tufts University and studied electronics at West
Point before leaving to marry in 1922. To support his young
family, he took a job as a newspaper reporter back in Boston and became
acquainted with amateur radio through a series of articles he wrote for
the fledgling American Radio Relay League.
In
1924, Bill Halligan went to
work for his long time friend, Toby Deutschmann selling radio
parts
to American radio manufacturers along the east coast. By 1928 the
radio business was booming and Chicago had become the world capital of
radio manufacturing. Halligan moved his family to Chicago and did
well in component sales until the Depression caught up to the radio
industry in 1931. According to legend, Deutschmann went bankrupt at
this time and left Halligan with no cash but a huge inventory of radio
parts and components. Halligan decided to turn his hobby of
building ham receivers for his friends into a business in an effort to
make use of the assets he had been left by Deutschmann, and while many
radio historians claim this story is apocryphal, we can attest to the
fact that we have removed paper capacitors labeled "Toby Deutschmann"
from Hallicrafters receivers built as late as 1938 -- some 7 years
later.
Halligan began business under the name "Hallicrafters" in
1932, choosing the motto "Handcraft Makes Perfect" and setting up shop
in an old manufacturing facility at 417 North State Street. The
fledgling company managed to produce the S-1 through S-3 models before
RCA threatened to put them out of business for copyright
infringement. At this time, all radio manufacturing was done
under license from RCA, and RCA had no intentions of granting Halligan
the licensing he needed to produce his own sets. The
Hallicrafters struggled along by contracting out their manufacturing to
other, duly licensed manufacturers, most notably Howard Radio Company,
another Chicago manufacturer of communications receivers.
In 1933 radio maverick McMurdo Silver's
company,
Silver-Marshall Inc., went
bankrupt and Hallicrafters took over in an effort to acquire the much
needed manufacturing license. The acquisition of the RCA license was
not
sufficient to compensate for the financial and creative difficulties
this
arrangement brought with it, and, by late 1934, Halligan was able
to seek and gain release from his obligations to Silver-Marshall.
At this point, Halligan turned his attention to another troubled radio
company with a valid license, not to mention a 50,000 square foot
manufacturing plant at 2611 Indiana Avenue. In 1935 he was
able to engineer a merger with Echophone Radio Company, with
Hallicrafters assuming the position as dominant partner. After
building much needed cash reserves with contract manufacturing, the
Hallicrafters line was relaunched with the SX-9 in late 1935.
From this point, there was no looking back. There
was never any doubt of Hallicrafters quality and engineering, and with
solid policy, good management and creative marketing, the company
quickly rose to dominate the industry. By 1938, Hallicrafters was
the most popular manufacturer of communications receivers in the United
States, as well as exporting products to 89 other countries.
One of the significant factors setting Hallicrafters
apart
from and above its competition was Halligan's own professional touch
and personal integrity, and it is this as much as anything else that
made Hallicrafters a great American success story during a time in
which much of corporate America was struggling -- and largely
unsuccessfully -- merely to keep its doors open. In 1935,
Hallicrafters introduced the 5-T "Sky Buddy," an introductory level
receiver aimed at boys between the ages of 14 and 16, and which was
sold for
its production cost of $29.50. Thirty dollars was a princely sum to a
boy in the mid 30's, so to market these sets, Hallicrafters came up
with the "Sky Buddy Club." The packet of materials that came with
membership included twelve envelopes in which to send $2.50 per month
to the company. There was a booklet that suggested odd jobs and
chores that could be done, usually for 25 cents, that would help raise
the necessary $2.50. A boy joining the club in January, and
completing his obligations by December, would have his new receiver
arrive just in time for Christmas. Halligan reasoned that a
program such as this would build unparalleled customer loyalty:
that a boy introduced to the radio hobby in this way would continue to
buy Hallicrafters products as an adult. This proved to be true and
devotees of Hallicrafters products remain today, many years after the
company ceased operations.
With the advent of World War II, Hallicrafters production
was largely dedicated to the ensuing demand for all things electronic
by the US government. Production of consumer electronics all but
ceased between 1942 and 1945, with one notable exception being a line
of inexpensive AC/DC receivers marketed under the resurrected Echophone
name plate.
These were marketed largely as broadcast receivers for servicemen and
their families, as the reception of shortwave stations from Europe took
on a new and more immediate importance. While Hallicrafters built
a myriad of products for the military, the most notable was the
SCR-299, a self contained portable radio station mounted in a truck and
featured prominently in Hallicrafters' advertising of the day.
After the war, a new plant was built at 4401 West Fifth
Avenue (pictured above) and post war production aimed at the pent up
demand for consumer products proceeded apace. Noted automotive
and industrial designer Raymond Lowey (Studebaker and others) was
brought in to give the entire Hallicrafters line a fresh, modern
look. The wartime Echophone EC-1 receiver was repackaged into the
S-38, which replaced the venerable Sky Buddy. The S-40, with its
distinctive green "half-moon" dial replaced the S-20R. Besides its
"bread and butter" shortwave and amateur radio equipment, the company
designed and marketed a plethora of consumer electronics, including
phonographs, AM/FM table radios, clock radios and television sets. Many
of these products bore the "Echophone" name. Hallicrafters basked
in the post war prosperity, and by 1952 employed 2500 people. The
cold war brought demand for numerous civil defense products, and a boom
in the popularity of Ham radio lead to the design of some of the
company's most classic transmitters, like the HT-32, and exotic
receivers, like the SX-101.
By 1958, Bill Halligan was ready to retire and sold the
company. Little is known about the details of this transaction,
but it was obviously unsuccessful and the Halligans resumed control and
continued to run the company until it was sold to Northrop Corporation
in 1966. Northrop concentrated on building mostly paramilitary
equipment for its defense division, though some Ham products were
designed and sold and the Hallicraftters name remained before the
public until the mid 1970's -- mostly on repackaged, cheap Japanese
consumer electronics items like boom boxes. Northrop handed
Hallicrafters over to it's partner, Wilcox, and in 1975, Wlicox sold it
to Braker Corporation of Dallas, Texas. Braker released a few CB
and portable radios of Japanese and Taiwanese origin under the
Hallicrafters brand until folding in the late 70's.
Since this time, there have been periodic attempts at
resurrecting the Hallicrafters name in some fashion or other, but these
have all ended in failure. For all intents and purposes,
what we think of as "Hallicrafters" ceased to exist when William
Halligan sold out in 1966.
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