Bill Lear Invents the 8-Track and Brings in Ford, Motorola, and RCA Victor

Although the 8-track today is dismissed as a failure, from a contemporary standpoint it was a huge success. It was the first tape format to achieve a true, national mass market. While the projections of the promoters of recorded tape on reel-to-reel had fallen short all during the 1950s and 1960s, cart sales on 4 and 8-track grew spectacularly from the early 1960s through the 1970s. While most of this was due to the 8-track, some labels continued to issue 4-tracks into the 1970s.

Meanwhile, a number of new contenders rose up to enjoy fleeting moments of glory. Bernard Cousino of Toledo, Ohio, for example, had designed an endless-loop tape cartridge that was marketed under the brand name Echo-matic. He had a measure of success with his Echo-matic cartridge in the early 1960s as a "point of sale" advertising medium and background music technology. In 1965 the Champion Spark Plug company (a subsidiary of Ford) purchased a controlling interest in Cousino's firm. With the success of the 8-Track, champion's insisted, the company became a manufacturer of Lear-style players, and Cousino became a major supplier of players for Sears Roebuck.

Cousino was involved in another significant venture as well. In the the early 1960s he had become aquainted with Alabama businessman John Herbert Orr, whose Orradio Industries tape manufacturing firm had recently been acquired by Ampex and who was preparing to start a new under the name John Herbert Orr Enterprises. Orr and Cousino cooked up a new firm, called Orrtronics, which was to be a company that made a home and automobile tape system based on the old Echo-matic cartridge. These Orrtronic "Auto-Mate" cartridges and players sold in significant numbers for a few years in the mid-1960s.

Meanwhile, Ford was debating the adoption of the Lear cartridge in 1965, and looking to its Champion division for guidance. Before it became clear that the 8-track would be widely adopted throughout the auto industry, it looked like Champion could introduce a competing product that did not depend on Lear patents. Champion funded the development at Orrtronics of such a competing system. This was the ill-fated "Orrtronics 8-Track", a cartridge similar to the Learjet product except for the way the tape loop was routed inside the plastic cartridge. It's not clear whether the system was ever sold to the public, but a few players and tapes have survived; they may represent demo models.