Recently I received some news that saddened me. One of the pioneer security manufacturers from the dawn of the automotive security industry, one that I had worked for early in my own career, had closed their doors for good. In addition to my feelings of nostalgia, I began to consider all the contributions this company had made toward advancing the technology of automotive security systems. Their many unique designs and innovations in no small way helped the evolution of vehicle security systems from their primitive beginnings to the complex systems oftoday.
To properly tell the story of Vehicle Security Electronics, Inc., or VSE as it came to be known, I conducted interviews with the two founding partners, Rudy Sanders and Lee Fleishman. My interviews refreshed my memory and filled in the gaps of a company history that began over a quarter century ago in 1974. To set the stage for you, in 1974, a typical auto alarm system consisted of a large red metal bell mounted under the hood, "hard wired" to the doors, hood, and if the deluxe model, to the trunk. "Setting" the system was accomplished by inserting a key into a key switch mounted on the driver's fender, and turning it one way for "on," and the other for "off." Woo-woo! Not exactly George Jetson stuff here, huh? What do you want, it was 1974; some of us, (like me), were just graduating from High School. There were no such things as compact discs, personal computers, or digital cameras yet. Corvettes and Cadillac's were highest on car thieves' most wanted lists, and professional auto theft had yet to become an $8 billion a year enterprise.
Back in 1974, observing this rather pathetic "state of the art" in vehicle security from the sidelines of their jobs at an auto radio sales and service company in the San Fernando Valley, a suburb of Los Angeles, were Rudy and Lee. They had just successfully completed their first collaboration by designing, building, and marketing an electronic device for automatically switching a car's speakers from the factory car radio to the new under-dash 8-Track tape players that were fast becoming popular. This "automatic radio/tape switch" may seem like child's play today, but back then, before the emergence of any of today's recognized car audio "aftermarket" companies, such installation problems were solved by those industry pioneers in the trenches as a simple matter of necessity. A business soon sprang up as demand increased for Rudy & Lee's automatic radio tape switches. As a result of their success with this simple item, they turned their attention to another nagging problem of the time, dead batteries caused by the "bell and fender key" alarm systems then in use.
Having both received extensive electronics education, Rudy and Lee examined the problem of the simple bell and fender key alarm and arrived at a very simple, yet previously untried electronic solution. The problem was that once the alarm was "triggered" by the opening of a door, it would simply fire off the bell under the hood, indefinitely! This would continue until either the owner returned and turned the key switch to the off position, or, as was often the case, until the car battery was completely drained. The solution was of course to add a time limit to the ringing of the bell. If necessity was the mother, then Rudy and Lee were the "fathers" of this invention, and the electronic universal timer module was born. Their timer module became an overnight success with many alarm installers, at least in their little corner of the world, and they were soon selling them by the gross to one of the brand-name vehicle security companies beginning to emerge in the western San Fernando Valley. While for a time their fledgling enterprise could be conducted out of their homes, in fact Lee actually recalled building some systems with a soldering iron on top of a clothes dryer in his mom's garage, the demand for their electronic inventions was growing rapidly.