JBL is an American audio and electronics company under Harman International Industries that was founded in 1946 by James Bullough Lansing.

The Founder: James Bullough Lansing, was possibly a manic-depressive genius, obsessed with inventing practically everything he could, including his own name.
Named James Martini, he was born on January 14, 1902, in Macoupin County, Illinois, the son of Henry Martini and Grace Erb Martini. Macoupin County, located north of the city of St. Louis, was a predominantly agricultural and mining area of the USA, and Henry Martini was a mining engineer.
His son, the ninth of Martini's fourteen children, was James Martini, who had a passion for engineering and machinery. It is said that around the age of 12, he built a small transmitter that put out a signal strong enough to jam the frequency of a local radio station.
James attended middle and high school in Springfield, Illinois, and took courses at a small business unit of the local university, but never had a formal degree in engineering. At some point in his younger years, he added the middle name of Bullough (after a family he met as a teenager) and for reasons that seem to be lost in the past, changed his surname to Lansing.

He spent the 1920s as an auto mechanic. After his mother died in late 1924, he moved to Lansing Salt Lake City. The city apparently had a job for an ambitious young booster, who knew and liked electrical machinery, and Lansing became an engineer at a local radio station.
But he wanted more. Not long after arriving in Salt Lake City, he founded the Lansing Manufacturing Company to build radio loudspeakers. Soon after, he found a businessman named Ken Decker to run the financial and marketing side of the company, and Lansing concentrated on technology.
The centre of electronics manufacturing in the southwestern United States was Salt Lake City, however Lansing moved his company to Los Angeles in early 1927.

James B. Lansing founded JBL a year after leaving Altec Lansing where he was vice president of engineering in 1947. Initially he designed series of loudspeakers and components that were primarily for home use. One of his main components was the D130; a 15", 4" voice coil loudspeaker, which in its variants is still in production years later.