Clairtone

~ the obit ~

Clairtone Sound Corporation was incorporated in Ontario on 2 July 1958 by Peter Munk, who had come out of Budapest on the Kastner train in 1944 and taken an electrical engineering degree in Toronto, and David Gilmour, who designed furniture. It started with four people and three thousand dollars. That pairing is the whole company in one line. Clairtone sold furniture with electronics in it, assembled from parts bought in: the first model, the 100-S, was a long low cabinet holding a Dual turntable and a Granco tube chassis, with the speakers hidden behind broadcloth from Knoll. It took a National Industrial Design Council award in March 1959, less than four months after going into production.

The marketing was as good as the cabinets, and Clairtone hired properly for it, including the typographer Carl Dair and Dalton Camp, who would later run Progressive Conservative campaigns. Oscar Peterson endorsed the machines under contract and Frank Sinatra fronted the advertising, which produced the line everyone still quotes: listen to Sinatra on Clairtone stereo, Sinatra does. Output went from 350 units in 1958 to 25,000 a year by 1963, the year the company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and earned three hundred thousand dollars on ten million of sales. Sales peaked in 1965 at $11,263,800.

Everything after that is a story about a factory. Nova Scotia paid Clairtone to move production to Stellarton, where the company switched from stereos to color televisions. The color market would not arrive for years. Munk and Gilmour lost control of the company on 27 August 1967 and were removed from their posts about two months later. The province bought the remains outright in March 1970 against nearly thirteen million dollars of debt. It closed the plants in 1971, the year the shares came off the exchange.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the spheres ~

The Project G was shown at the National Furniture Show in Chicago in January 1964. Hugh Spencer designed it, with John Magyar, and Spencer was a CBC set designer rather than an engineer, which tells you where the priorities sat. It ran to about seven feet of rosewood on a metal base, and at either end a 46-centimeter spun aluminum sphere hung out on a cantilever, hermetically sealed around a Wharfedale driver and able to rotate through 340 degrees. IEEE Spectrum puts the price at around eighteen hundred and fifty Canadian dollars and the production run at fewer than five hundred units. Those globes are why anyone remembers the company. They moved the speakers out of the cabinet and onto mounts of their own, which is what consumer audio has done ever since.

Fame arrived fast. The Project G took a silver medal at the Milan Triennale and Irving Penn shot it for the brochures. It appeared in Marriage on the Rocks in 1965, which Clairtone's own historians call product placement before anyone had the phrase. The G2 turned up two years later in The Graduate, in Mrs. Robinson's house. Hugh Hefner bought a Project G for the Playboy Mansion.

~ stellarton ~

Frank Sobey had been mayor of Stellarton until 1959 and was running Industrial Estates Limited, the Nova Scotia crown agency, when he helped Clairtone get provincial money for an electronics plant in his old town. The announcement came in November 1964 and the financing was a first-mortgage bond of just over seven million dollars. The plant covered 250,000 square feet on Acadia Avenue and was in full operation by August 1966, and at its peak it employed about twelve hundred people, more than half of them women. The company used the move to change what it made and went after color television. The G-TV got the full Clairtone launch: a commercial in which Munk and Gilmour drive a 1936 Pierce-Arrow convertible across the Brooklyn Bridge with a television set in the back.

Then the plant did not work. A study Clairtone commissioned in 1967 put the blame on the local workforce, in language comparing Pictou County to Appalachia that read badly then and reads worse now, and Munk was still saying versions of it forty years later, telling the Globe and Mail in 2008 that the people he hired had been more interested in lobster fishing and unemployment insurance. The peer-reviewed account of the collapse, by Lachlan MacKinnon, works from the company's own archived records and finds a management failure wearing a regional stereotype: cost controls described as nonexistent, and roads so rough that finished sets were damaged on the way out. A furniture company had been paid to move somewhere with no electronics industry around it and then asked to build televisions.

~ the money ~

Losses reached $6.6 million in 1967 against gross sales of $17.5 million, and the stock, which had been above fifteen dollars that year, was worth a few cents by 1970. The Nova Scotia legislature held hearings on the affair in 1968, where Sobey was called and defended Munk as a builder who had gone too fast, and again in 1969, where Munk described the situation in one word as chaos. Over the life of the investment the province lost somewhere around twenty-five million dollars, and some accounts put it at twenty-six or more. There was no royal commission, whatever people remember. There were legislative hearings and a liquidation, and a number Nova Scotians have not forgotten.

~ what replaced it ~

Munk and Gilmour landed on their feet, which is the part Nova Scotia has never entirely forgiven. They put money into oceanfront land in Fiji and built it into a hotel group of fifty-four resorts, and in 1979 Munk went home to start what became Barrick Gold. He died in 2018 one of the richest men in Canada, having given away more than three hundred million dollars, none of it notably to Nova Scotia. His daughter Nina, born weeks after he lost the company, wrote the standard book about the failure. Thirteen meters of Clairtone's paperwork sit at the Nova Scotia Archives, which is what the province has left of the investment.

What marks the end is a pocket radio. Under provincial management the company went down-market and sold a two-transistor AM set called the Mini Hi-Fi, earphone reception only, advertised as the world's smallest. English Wikipedia files Clairtone as dissolved in 1979, which comes from one uncited sentence in the archives' own finding aid that the same page contradicts a few paragraphs later, so this grave uses 1971. The name is loose now and people are reaching for it: a Project G sits in the Royal Ontario Museum, Ron Mann's documentary opened in Toronto in December 2025, and in February 2026 two unrelated parties, one in Hong Kong and one in Switzerland, filed to register CLAIRTONE in Canada for loudspeakers and turntables within a week of each other.

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