Last week Arnold Wolf, the former head of audio company JBL, passed away. Wolf was one of the few industrial design pioneers that not only formed his own studio back in the '50s, but who would also, unusually, be later asked to take over a client's company as CEO.
Wolf's career path was atypical from the start. "There is inherent irony in my having been elected to [the Academy of Fellows]," he told the IDSA upon winning that honor in 1983, "or, indeed, to my being a member of IDSA in the first place. The reason is that I have never studied industrial design formally, and so can be regarded as a largely undetected impostor."
After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in the early 1940s, Wolf worked as a radio actor specializing in European dialects. (He presumably had a good ear, which wouldn't hurt for his later work with JBL.) By the mid-'40s Wolf was putting his natural drawing skills to use doing "commercial art" for a Hollywood studio, and later got into advertising and theater art. By the mid-1950s he formed his own studio in the relatively young field of industrial design.
That same year, 1957, Wolf landed a rather important client: James B. Lansing Sound, Incorporated. JBL was developing a crazy, and huge, new type of speaker built around audio principles developed by sound engineer Richard Ranger.
Wolf was called on to design the nine-foot beast, which was centered around a large, curved piece of wood that the mid-range drivers fired towards; the resultant audio reflection "[created] a wide, spacious stereo image."
The Paragon, as it was called, was a success. It had an almost absurdly long production life, remaining part of JBL's offerings until 1983, and today remains a sought-after collectible among audiophiles who can restore them.
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