CORPORATIONS: Mr. Navcom

William Powell Lear is an inventive genius whose restless mind and huge energies have made him, at 56, the head of a $64 million business turning out close to 700 navigational, communications and control systems and devices for planes and missiles. Although he quit school in the eighth grade, Lear can sketch a complete instrument system for a single-engined plane or a jet transport on a nightclub napkin. In 1950, despite his well-earned reputation as a stay-up-all-night playboy, he won the Collier Trophy for distinguished service to aviation as a designer-manufacturer. In 1956 he achieved a different kind of notoriety by flying his Cessna 310 to Moscow on an impromptu tourist trip (TIME, July 9, 1956), stirred up a storm in Washington, which feared, wrongly, that he planned to sell the Russians his products.

Last week restless Bill Lear was off to something new, as usual. In West Los Angeles he opened a $250,000 laboratory to put his company into solid-state physics in his search for new products. Among far-out fields to be studied: microcircuitry (e.g., reducing the chassis of a satellite television unit to a few cubic inches) and electroluminescence (e.g., picturing all of a plane's instrument readings on a cockpit window so the pilot will not have to glance away even when landing or taking off). While moving farther into the wild blue yonder, he is also readying new gadgets for planes. His newest commercial product: the $1,500 Navcom (combination communications and navigation instrument box), which puts even single-engined or twin-engined executive-type planes on a par with big commercial airliners when flying on instruments through rough weather.

From Hannibal to Space. Inventor Lear's restlessness hit early. Born in Hannibal, Mo., Mark Twain's home town, he enlisted in the Navy at 16, was made a radio instructor at the Great Lakes Training Station. He learned so much that, discharged at 18, he soon opened his own radio consulting and manufacturing firm. Among his early jobs: designing a special coil that made possible the first practical commercial auto radio. He learned to fly, and in 1930 opened an aviation-electronics business that turned out the first practical light-plane radio. After World War II, Lear burgeoned as the world's largest manufacturer of autopilots and a major supplier of other gadgets for planes and a dozen missiles, including the Titan, Bomarc, Polaris and Nike-Zeus. On the side, after three quick marriages, Lear settled down with Wife No. 4, Moya Olsen, daughter of Olsen of the Olsen & Johnson comedy team. His own enthusiasm for flying is so great that Mrs. Lear, in self-defense, is taking flying lessons. Their two boys, 15 and 9, are already flyers, and at times Lear has put even youngest daughter Tina, 3½, at the controls.