The Mad Texan Who Built Klipsch in a Tin Shed

In 1946, an Army major working seventy-hour weeks built a loudspeaker in an eleven-by-twenty-two-foot tin shed in Hope, Arkansas, for ten dollars a month in rent. That speaker, the Klipschorn, is still in production today, the longest run of any loudspeaker in history. This video tells the story of Paul Wilbur Klipsch, the eccentric engineer behind one of America's most famous speaker companies. We go back to where it actually started, and it isn't the big-city corporate origin most people assume. Born in Indiana, raised in El Paso, trained as an electrical engineer, Klipsch worked as a geophysicist and maintained locomotives in Chile before he ever folded a horn into a corner and changed home audio. You'll learn how the corner-horn design solved a real problem in the 1940s, when amplifiers were too weak to fill a room. We get into the man himself too, the four watches he wore at once, the altimeter on his car dashboard, and the yellow lapel button he handed out at trade shows with one blunt word printed on it. And we follow the company from that 1948 telephone exchange building all the way to its 2025 sale to a Michigan firm, with the Heritage speakers still hand-built in Hope. A few things you'll take away: why he chose a tiny Arkansas town over New York, how his last design finally surpassed the Klipschorn twenty years after his death, and the venture that lost him ten thousand dollars but launched a rival's star engineer. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:32 Who Was Paul Klipsch 01:14 Early Career 01:37 The Corner Horn 02:23 Why Hope, Arkansas 03:08 The Speaker Lineup 03:42 The Bull**it Button 04:55 What Surprised Me 05:27 Later Years and Legacy 06:48 Modern Day and Close DailyAha covers the stories behind vintage hi-fi brands and the people who built them. If you have any questions, please contact: [email protected]