Zenith Radio Corporation, Est. 1918

The company that would become the Zenith Corporation began quite literally inside a “radio shack”—a nondescript two-car garage in Edgewater that served as both a makeshift assembly plant and a broadcasting bunker. The Chicago Radio Laboratory, as it was originally known in 1919, was the brainchild of two baby-faced ham radio nerds; 22-year-old Pennsylvania native Karl Hassel and 21-year-old Chicagoan Ralph Mathews. During World War I, the two cadets crossed paths at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station and immediately bonded over their shared obsession with oscillating audion circuits and long wave receivers. Now, with the war in the rearview, both fellas set their sights on what they agreed was the imminent rise of the radio age… read more >