![]() The target was to have the new radio on the market in time for the 1954 Christmas shopping season. jumped at the chance to produce a transistor radio. Its main product up to that time had been a line of vacuum tube-operated television signal boosters marketed under the Regency brand name. TI finally found a partner in a company called I.D.E.A., Inc., of Indianapolis, IN. TI decided that a portable, handheld radio offered the most mainstream application of the new technology and approached several large corporations about producing the radio they had designed using TI transistors, but companies - such as RCA and Motorola - did not believe the transistor’s time had yet arrived and passed on the offer. The First Transistor Radioīy early 1954, Texas Instruments (TI) had perfected production to the point that transistors became cheap enough for use in consumer items. Efforts were underway to refine transistor production so that individual devices would become inexpensive enough for use in consumer items. Transistors offered many improvements over the vacuum tube: They were smaller, used much less power, and were more reliable. The transistor - a revolutionary solid-state device capable of amplification - had been invented back in 1947, but its actual application to mass-produced consumer items had been limited, as production of transistors had yet to be perfected, so their cost remained high. As a result, few portable radios saw much use. Portable, battery powered radios had been around since the 1920s, but were limited by the requirement for several battery voltages, very short life of the batteries, expense of battery operation, and size of the vacuum tubes required. The combination of high power use and large size meant that few practical, portable devices utilizing vacuum tubes were created. In addition, most standard vacuum tubes were large in comparison to other electronic devices. As vacuum tubes required heating by filaments to function, the current use was high. Vacuum tubes were the only way of performing many electronic functions - such as amplification and rectification (although the solid-state diode had appeared on the scene by this time) - but were generally limited to devices that could be plugged in. Almost anything electronic required vacuum tubes - an invention dating back to the beginning of the 20th century that had yet to be improved on. The TR-55 was the first product to carry the Sony name, and we strive to put the same work into every single product bearing our logo.In 1954, the world was a far different place than it is now. With their dogged determination, Ibuka and Morita defied expectations and went above and beyond what anyone thought possible, and we still hold these values to this day. In fact, the C1 and C1T clock radios are two of our best-selling products. We’re still producing radios to this day, each one an homage to the original TR-55 transistor radio. It was the first transistor radio to be released in Japan, and its success was such that Esaki received a Nobel Prize for his work in 1973. They asked questions, they researched, they experimented and they examined, and with the help of physicist Leo Esaki and a large group of Sony engineers, they managed to drastically reduce the size of the transistor and build a radio that in Morita’s words was “not just portable, but ‘pocketable’”. In Morita’s book Made In Japan, Morita says: “The people at Western Electric told me that if we wanted to use the transistor in consumer items, the hearing aid was the only product we should expect to make with it.”īut despite warnings from the experts, Ibuka and Morita were persistent with their goal. Ibuka and Morita flew back and forth to the States numerous times, but Western Electrics were sceptical of the duo’s ambitious vision. In 1955, Sony founders Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita wanted to build a radio using a transistor, an exciting new semiconductor device that was owned by an American company called Western Electrics. There’s no better example of our continuing innovation than the story behind the TR-55. ![]() But without it, we might not even be here today. The TR-55 not only changed the public’s perceptions on Japanese products for good, but it set us on the path for the success that followed. But this all changed with the release of the Sony TR-55: a revolutionary and now legendary compact transistor radio that we discussed last year. They were thought of as cheap, poorly-built imitations of the higher quality products being manufactured over here in the West. In the fifties, products made in Japan were generally considered to be undesirable. The phrase ‘made in Japan’ didn’t used to have the same air of superiority that it does nowadays.
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