As a result of the popularity of transistor radios, which empowered privacy and individualism, the way people listen to radio or music has changed forever.
#VINTAGE 1961 SONY TRANSISTOR RADIO PORTABLE#
market and launched the new industry of consumer microelectronics." By the mid-1950s, American teens had begun buying portable transistor radios in huge numbers, helping to propel the fledgling industry from an estimated 100,000 units in 1955 to 5,000,000 units by the end of 1968. University of Arizona professor Michael Brian Schiffer, PhD, says, "Sony was not first, but its transistor radio was the most successful. The word soon featured in English dictionary. The company marketed the radio as "pocketable", a Japanese-style English word the company came up with to highlight its portability and pocket-size. The following year, 1957, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo came out with the TR-63 model, then the smallest (112 × 71 × 32 mm) transistor radio in commercial production. In May 1956, the company released the TR-6, which featured an innovative slim design and sound quality capable of rivaling portable tube radios. Featuring six transistors, push-pull output and greatly improved sound quality, the TR-72 continued to be a popular seller into the early sixties. They followed up in December of the same year by releasing the TR-72, a product that won favor both within Japan and in export markets, including Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and Germany. In August 1955, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo released the Sony TR-55, Japan's first commercially produced transistor radio. While most Japanese companies were researching the transistor for its military applications, Ibuka and Morita looked to apply it to communications.Īlthough the American companies Regency Electronics and Texas Instruments built the first transistor radio as joint venture in 1954, it would be the Ibuka's company that made them commercially successful for the first time.
Bell Labs agreed to do so while recommending Ibuka to produce Hearing aids using the transistor, then a popular application for the technology, suggesting that it would be difficult to apply the technology to radio.
#VINTAGE 1961 SONY TRANSISTOR RADIO LICENSE#
He convinced Bell to license the transistor technology to his Japanese company. In the early 1950s, Ibuka traveled to the United States, looking for a market for the company's tape recorder, and heard about Bell Labs' invention of the transistor.
Sony's former headquarters in Shinagawa, Tokyo
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