It's Missionaries All The Way Down

     The first place I saw the company logo was the same as a lot of people: on an amplifier.  You saw big ones at concerts and smaller ones at radio stations, and they were just about indestructible: Crown amplifiers.  For many people of my generation and younger, there was an association between Crown amps and rock music.

     (The second place I saw the logo was on a product with closer links to the company's origin, a tape recorder.)

     You can imagine my surprise when, years later, I learned the "crown" in question wasn't meant to refer to any peak of technical perfection or earthly sovereign.  Nope.  It was the crown of Jesus.  And the story of the company was a story about missionaries -- some of them with slide rules and soldering irons.

     Crown didn't set out to make audio amplifiers, though they arrived at the pretty quickly.  They didn't even start out as "Crown."  In the years right after World War Two, audio tape recording was one of the hottest new technologies.  Everyone was finding new uses for high-fidelity recording and playback, easy editing and rapid duplication.  Looking back, it's easy to forget that the only audio recording system good for anything better than scratchy voice was discs, typically big 16" recordings, celluloid over a soft aluminum core, running at 78 rpm for best quality, easily broken, easily bent, flammable* and impossible to edit.  Everyone wanted tape -- and that included preachers.

     Religious institutions had been quick to adopt radio broadcasting when it started out.  How better to reach the populace than with their own programs, or better yet, their own stations?  Tape recording was a natural fit, for many reasons.  Even missionaries were using tape -- and that's how pastor (and radio amateur) Clarence C. Moore of Elkhart, Indiana first got involved.  Early tape recorders were large and fragile; Moore began modifying them to hold up to the rigors of missionary work.

     Clarence Moore was already involved with radio station HCJB in Quito, Ecuador.  Anyone who was a shortwave listener from the 1930s through the early 2000s will recognize the call letters.  At one point, you could pick up the station almost any time of night or day, just about anywhere in the world.  (Airport expansion and, reading between the lines, an increasingly uncooperative local government led the station to scale back high-power shortwave broadcasting, but they're still around, and these days the parent organization works to "plant" local-service stations in underserved locations all around the world.)  The station first went on the air in 1931, and was known for getting high-quality results on a tight budget.

     Back home in Elkhart, Moore's International Radio and Electronics Corporation had gone from modifying tape recorders to building their own -- lighter than the competition, simpler in some ways, but rugged and reliable.  Before too long, the missionaries were asking for PA amplifiers, and IREC built them, too, eventually becoming one of the first companies to combine the two, producing a portable (or at least luggable) recording and playback system capable of serving a crowd.

     By the 1960s, the company's products were selling to a wide group of customers.  The Moores owned radio stations in Elkhart and the company changed their name to Crown.  Maybe it was a subtle message to all the radio and music heathens who were using their equipment; under any name, the quality spoke for itself.  And that's notable.  There are some companies with religious affiliation that lean into religion -- "Buy our stuff 'cos we share your faith," and sometimes the goods don't quite measure up.  That's not how the pastor from Elkhart worked.  Crown was always first-rate.  A Crown amp would deliver power to a horrendous load without undue distortion -- they ran ads showing their more powerful amplifiers with 60 Hz audio plugged in the input running an electric drill from the output.

     Crown got into high-end hi-fi early on, and built a range of products.  They always had a close association with HCJB.  By the late 1970s, they were out of the tape recorder business, but were manufacturing FM tuners, graphic equalizers and other products along with amplifiers.  In 1980, they brought the first Pressure Zone Microphone to market -- it's a remarkable and very different approach to picking up sound, and the engineer behind it once worked for a radio station that I worked for, years later.  But that's another story, and one with too much unverifiable hearsay to tell.

     Moore had also been involved in RF work.  Early on, he'd developed a directional antenna for HCJB and in 1975, when the station needed a high-power shortwave transmitter, Crown offered workspace (and presumably expertise) in Elkhart to HCJB engineers, where they developed a 500,000 Watt, frequency-agile transmitter. Many of those transmitters remain in service around the world, long after the transmission center in Ecuador shut down.  Crown also got in on the early development of solid-state FM transmitters, and built models with outputs ranging from ten to 500 Watts that have sold well for years.

     Clarence Moore died in 1979.  In 2000, Crown's audio line was bought by Harman and it's still around, using a crown-in-circle logo.  Meanwhile, the RF side stayed with (or was repurchased by, information varies) Moore's descendants, and as a division of International Radio and Electronics, Crown Broadcast still builds FM transmitters (and rebroadcast receivers), with a crown-in-rounded-square logo.  The same family remains at the helm and the same faith guides them -- and, heathen that I am, I will note the quality of their products remains high.  SonSet Solutions continues the work of the engineering team that built and installed the big shortwave transmitters for HCJB, too, supporting religious broadcasters and the shortwave equipment as well as local-scaled stations.  That's quite a record of accomplishment for Clarence C. Moore!

     (Apocryphally, people who worked at the Moore's stations in Elkhart decades ago report they were typical medium-to-small-market owners, careful with their money, not paying DJs more than necessary -- but the stations did have some unique custom equipment, including a couple of the very few Crown-branded large audio mixers!)
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* A common prank at radio stations was to leave a small ball of celluloid cutterhead shavings in an ashtray.  It would go up almost like flash powder when a lit cigarette came near.  Given that the other thing laying around radio studios was heaps and heaps of paper -- logs, scripts, teletype wirecopy, newspapers and record sleeves ("shucks") -- you can imagine how popular this kind of hijinks was with management and other responsible adults.