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William (Bill) J. Halligan, founder of Hallicrafters, was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1899. He got his first ham license as a teenager. Even at that age he considered himself a radio experimenter and bulit an early spark-gap transmitter. Bill's first job, at age 16, was as a wireless operator on excursion ships between Boston and other coastal cities. When World War I began, he put his skills to good use by serving his country as a wireless radio operator on the battleship Illinois. After the war was over he attended engineering school at Tufts College and West Point, but left when he married in 1922. He took a job as a newspaper reporter, and then left journalism in 1924 to sell radio parts. In 1928 he decided to start his own company, and moved to Chicago, Illinois. This salesman had ideas for improving the short-wave radios he had been selling. It was a brave venture, with almost no capital, manufacturing license problems and then the depression, but in 1933 Bill founded the Hallicrafters company that made him a legend.
Hallicrafters built handcrafted receivers with state-of-the-art features at an affordable price. By 1938, Hallicrafters was considered one of the "Big Three" manufacturers of amateur receivers (Hallicrafters, National and Hammarlund) and was selling not only in the U.S. but 89 other countries. He had 23 different models of transceivers and was ready to start producing transmitters, beginning with the HT-1. Instead of putting a lot into expensive cabinets, Halligan believed in providing every nickel's worth into the performance of the chassis and the latest in circuit design. His greatest salesmen were those who used his equipment and praised it to others over the air.
From:http://hug-a-bug.com/hallentr.html.
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