Transistor radio

The invention:



 Miniature portable radio that used transistors and

created a new mass market for electronic products.









The people behind the invention:



John Bardeen (1908-1991), an American physicist

Walter H. Brattain (1902-1987), an American physicist

William Shockley (1910-1989), an American physicist

Akio Morita (1921-1999), a Japanese physicist and engineer

Masaru Ibuka (1907-1997), a Japanese electrical engineer and

industrialist





A Replacement for Vacuum Tubes



The invention of the first transistor by William Shockley, John

Bardeen, andWalter H. Brattain of Bell Labs in 1947 was a scientific

event of great importance. Its commercial importance at the time,

however, was negligible. The commercial potential of the transistor

lay in the possibility of using semiconductor materials to carry out

the functions performed by vacuum tubes, the fragile and expensive

tubes that were the electronic hearts of radios, sound amplifiers,

and telephone systems. Transistors were smaller, more rugged,

and less power-hungry than vacuum tubes. They did not suffer

from overheating. They offered an alternative to the unreliability

and short life of vacuum tubes.

Bell Labs had begun the semiconductor research project in an effort

to find a better means of electronic amplification. This was

needed to increase the strength of telephone signals over long distances.

Therefore, the first commercial use of the transistor was

sought in speech amplification, and the small size of the device

made it a perfect component for hearing aids. Engineers from the

Raytheon Company, the leading manufacturer of hearing aids, were

invited to Bell Labs to view the new transistor and to help assess the

commercial potential of the technology. The first transistorized consumer

product, the hearing aid, was soon on the market. The early

models built by Raytheon used three junction-type transistors and

cost more than two hundred dollars. They were small enough to go

directly into the ear or to be incorporated into eyeglasses.

The commercial application of semiconductors was aimed largely

at replacing the control and amplification functions carried out by

vacuum tubes. The perfect vehicle for this substitution was the radio

set. Vacuum tubes were the most expensive part of a radio set

and the most prone to break down. The early junction transistors

operated best at low frequencies, and subsequently more research

was needed to produce a commercial high-frequency transistor.

Several of the licensees embarked on this quest, including the Radio

Corporation of America (RCA), Texas Instruments, and the Tokyo

Telecommunications Engineering Company of Japan.



Perfecting the Transistor



The Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company of Japan,

formed in 1946, had produced a line of instruments and consumer

products based on vacuum-tube technology. Its most successful

product was a magnetic tape recorder. In 1952, one of the founders

of the company, Masaru Ibuka, visited the United States to learn

more about the use of tape recorders in schools and found out that

Western Electric was preparing to license the transistor patent.With

only the slightest understanding of the workings of semiconductors,

Tokyo Telecommunications purchased a license in 1954 with

the intention of using transistors in a radio set.

The first task facing the Japanese was to increase the frequency

response of the transistor to make it suitable for radio use. Then a

method of manufacturing transistors cheaply had to be found. At

the time, junction transistors were made from slices of germanium

crystal. Growing the crystal was not an exact science, nor was the

process of “doping” it with impurities to form the different layers of

conductivity that made semiconductors useful. The Japanese engineers

found that the failure rate for high-frequency transistors was

extremely high. The yield of good transistors from one batch ran as

low as 5 percent, which made them extremely expensive and put the

whole project in doubt. The effort to replace vacuum tubes with

components made of semiconductors was motivated by cost rather

than performance; if transistors proved to be more expensive, then

it was not worth using them.

Engineers from Tokyo Telecommunications again came to the

United States to search for information about the production of

transistors. In 1954, the first high-frequency transistor was produced

in Japan. The success of Texas Instruments in producing the

components for the first transistorized radio (introduced by the Regency

Company in 1954) spurred the Japanese to greater efforts.

Much of their engineering and research work was directed at the

manufacture and quality control of transistors. In 1955, they introduced

their transistor radio, the TR-55, which carried the brand

name “Sony.” The name was chosen because the executives of the

company believed that the product would have an international appeal

and therefore needed a brand name that could be recognized

easily and remembered in many languages. In 1957, the name of the

entire company was changed to Sony.



Impact



Although Sony’s transistor radios were successful in the marketplace,

they were still relatively large and cumbersome. Ibuka saw a

consumer market for a miniature radio and gave his engineers the

task of designing a radio small enough to fit into a shirt pocket. The

realization of this design—“Transistor Six”—was introduced in 1957.

It was an immediate success. Sony sold the radios by the millions,

and numerous imitations were also marketed under brand names

such as “Somy” and “Sonny.” The product became an indispensable

part of popular culture of the late 1950’s and 1960’s; its low cost enabled

the masses to enjoy radio wherever there were broadcasts.

The pocket-sized radio was the first of a line of electronic consumer

products that brought technology into personal contact with

the user. Sony was convinced that miniaturization did more than

make products more portable; it established a one-on-one relationship

between people and machines. Sony produced the first alltransistor

television in 1960. Two years later, it began to market a

miniature television in the United States. The continual reduction in

the size of Sony’s tape recorders reached a climax with the portable

tape player introduced in the 1980’s. The SonyWalkman was a marketing

triumph and a further reminder that Japanese companies led

the way in the design and marketing of electronic products.





John Bardeen





The transistor reduced the size of electronic circuits and at

the same time the amount of energy lost from them as heat.

Superconduction gave rise to electronic circuits with practically

no loss of energy at all. John Bardeen helped unlock the secrets

of both.

Bardeen was born in 1908 in Madison,Wisconsin, where his

mother was an artist and his father was a professor of anatomy

at the University ofWisconsin. Bardeen attended the university,

earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1928

and a master’s degree in geophysics in 1929. After working as a

geophysicist, he entered Princeton University, studying with

Eugene Wigner, the leading authority on solid-state physics,

and received a doctorate in mathematics and physics in 1936.

Bardeen taught at Harvard University and the University of

Minnesota until World War II, when he moved to the Naval

Ordnance Laboratory. Finding academic salaries too low to

support his family after the war, he accepted a position at Bell

Telephone Laboratories. There, with Walter Brattain, he turned

William Shockley’s theory of semiconductors into a practical

device—the transfer resistor, or transistor.

He returned to academia as a professor at the University of

Illinois and began to investigate a long-standing mystery in

physics, superconductivity, with a postdoctoral associate, Leon

Cooper, and a graduate student, J. Robert Schrieffer. In 1956

Cooper made a key discovery—superconducting electrons

travel in pairs. And while Bardeen was in Stockholm, Sweden,

collecting a share of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work

on transistors, Schrieffer worked out a mathematical analysis of

the phenomenon. The theory that the three men published since

became known as BCS theory from the first letters of their last

names, and as well as explain superconductors, it pointed toward

a great deal of technology and additional basic research.

The team won the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics for BCS theory,

making Bardeen the only person to ever win two Nobel Prizes

for physics. He retired in 1975 and died sixteen years later.





See also :  Compact disc; FM radio; Radio; Radio crystal sets; Television;

Transistor;



Further Reading



Handy, Roger, Maureen Erbe, and Aileen Antonier. Made in Japan:

Transistor Radios of the 1950s and 1960s. San Francisco: Chronicle

Books, 1993.



Marshall, David V. Akio Morita and Sony. Watford: Exley, 1995.

Morita, Akio, with Edwin M. Reingold, and Mitsuko Shimomura.

Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony. London: HarperCollins, 1994.









Nathan, John. Sony: The Private Life. London: HarperCollins-

Business, 2001.

Transistor

The invention: 



A miniature electronic device, comprising a tiny

semiconductor and multiple electrical contacts, used in circuits

as an amplifier, detector, or switch, that revolutionized electronics

in the mid-twentieth century.



The people behind the invention:



William B. Shockley (1910-1989), an American physicist who led

the Bell Laboratories team that produced the first transistors

Akio Morita (1921-1999), a Japanese physicist and engineer who

was the cofounder of the Sony electronics company

Masaru Ibuka (1908-1997), a Japanese electrical engineer and

businessman who cofounded Sony with Morita








The Birth of Sony



In 1952, a Japanese engineer visiting the United States learned

that the Western Electric company was granting licenses to use its

transistor technology. He was aware of the development of this device

and thought that it might have some commercial applications.

Masaru Ibuka told his business partner in Japan about the opportunity,

and they decided to raise the $25,000 required to obtain a license.

The following year, his partner, Akio Morita, traveled to New

York City and concluded negotiations with Western Electric. This

was a turning point in the history of the Sony company and in the

electronics industry, for transistor technology was to open profitable

new fields in home entertainment.

The origins of the Sony corporation were in the ruins of postwar

Japan. The Tokyo Telecommunications Company was incorporated

in 1946 and manufactured a wide range of electrical equipment

based on the existing vacuum tube technology. Morita and Ibuka

were involved in research and development of this technology during

the war and intended to put it to use in the peacetime economy.

In the United States and Europe, electrical engineers who had done

the same sort of research founded companies to build advanced

audio products such as high-performance amplifiers, but Morita

and Ibuka did not have the resources to make such sophisticated

products and concentrated on simple items such as electric water

heaters and small electric motors for record players.

In addition to their experience as electrical engineers, both men

were avid music lovers, as a result of their exposure to Americanbuilt

phonographs and gramophones exported to Japan in the early

twentieth century. They decided to combine their twin interests by

devising innovative audio products and looked to the new field of

magnetic recording as a likely area for exploitation. They had learned

about tape recorders from technical journals and had seen them in

use by the American occupation force.

They developed a reel-to-reel tape recorder and introduced it in

1950. It was a large machine with vacuum tube amplifiers, so heavy

that they transported it by truck. Although it worked well, they had

a hard job selling it. Ibuka went to the United States in 1952 partly

on a fact-finding mission and partly to get some ideas about marketing

the tape recorder to schools and businesses. It was not seen as a

consumer product.

Ibuka and Morita had read about the invention of the transistor

inWestern Electric’s laboratories shortly after the war. John Bardeen

andWalter H. Brattain had discovered that a semiconducting material

could be used to amplify or control electric current. Their point

contact transistor of 1948 was a crude laboratory apparatus that

served as the basis for further research. The project was taken over

byWilliam B. Shockley, who had suggested the theory of the transistor

effect. A new generation of transistors was devised; they were

simpler and more efficient than the original. The junction transistors

were the first to go into production.





Ongoing Research



Bell Laboratories had begun transistor research becauseWestern

Electric, one of its parent companies along with American Telephone

and Telegraph, was interested in electronic amplification.

This was seen as a means to increase the strength of telephone signals

traveling over long distances, a job carried out by vacuum

tubes. The junction transistor was developed as an amplifier.Western

Electric thought that the hearing aid was the only consumer

product that could be based on it and saw the transistor solely as a

telecommunications technology. The Japanese purchased the license

with only the slightest understanding of the workings of

semiconductors and despite the belief that transistors could not be

used at the high frequencies associated with radio.

The first task of Ibuka and Morita was to develop a highfrequency

transistor. Once this was accomplished, in 1954, a method

had to be found to manufacture it cheaply. Transistors were made

from crystals, which had to be grown and doped with impurities to

form different layers of conductivity. This was not an exact science,

and Sony engineers found that the failure rate for high-frequency

transistors was very high. This increased costs and put the entire

project into doubt, because the adoption of transistors was based on

simplicity, reliability, and low cost.

The introduction of the first Sony transistor radio, the TR-55, in

1955 was the result of basic research combined with extensive industrial

engineering. Morita admitted that its sound was poor, but

because it was the only transistor radio in Japan, it sold well. These

were not cheap products, nor were they particularly compact. The

selling point was that they consumed much less battery power than

the old portable radios.

The TR-55 carried the brand name Sony, a relative of the Soni

magnetic tape made by the company and a name influenced by the

founders’ interest in sound. Morita and Ibuka had already decided

that the future of their company would be in international trade and

wanted its name to be recognized all over the world. In 1957, they

changed the company’s name from Tokyo Telecomunications Engineering

to Sony.

The first product intended for the export market was a small

transistor radio. Ibuka was disappointed at the large size of the TR-

55 because one of the advantages of the transistor over the vacuum

tube was supposed to be smaller size. He saw a miniature radio as a

promising consumer product and gave his engineers the task of designing

one small enough to fit into his shirt pocket.

All elements of the radio had to be reduced in size: amplifier,

transformer, capacitor, and loudspeaker. Like many other Japanese

manufacturers, Sony bought many of the component parts of its

products from small manufacturers, all of which had to be cajoled

into decreasing the size of their parts. Morita and Ibuka stated that

the hardest task in developing this new product was negotiating

with the subcontractors. Finally, the Type 63 pocket transistor radio

the “Transistor Six”—was introduced in 1957.





Impact



When the transistor radio was introduced, the market for radios

was considered to be saturated. People had rushed to buy them

when they were introduced in the 1920’s, and by the time of the

Great Depression, the majority of American households had one.

Improvements had been made to the receiver and more attractive

radio/phonograph console sets had been introduced, but these developments

did not add many new customers. The most manufacturers

could hope for was the replacement market with a few sales

as children moved out of their parents’ homes and established new

households.

The pocket radio created a new market. It could be taken anywhere

and used at any time. Its portability was its major asset, and it

became an indispensable part of youth-oriented popular culture of

the 1950’s and 1960’s. It provided an outlet for the crowded airwaves

of commercialAMradio and was the means to bring the new

music of rock and roll to a mass audience.

As soon as Sony introduced the Transistor Six, it began to redesign

it to reduce manufacturing cost. Subsequent transistor radios

were smaller and cheaper. Sony sold them by the millions, and millions

more were made by other companies under brand names such

as “Somy” and “Sonny.” By 1960, more than twelve million transistor

radios had been sold.

The transistor radio was the product that established Sony as an

international audio concern. Morita had resisted the temptation to

make radios for other companies to sell under their names. Exports

of Sony radios increased name recognition and established a bridgehead

in the United States, the biggest market for electronic consumer

products. Morita planned to follow the radio with other transistorized

products.

The television had challenged radio’s position as the mechanical

entertainer in the home. Like the radio, it stood in nearly every

American living room and used the same vacuum tube amplification

unit. The transistorized portable television set did for images

what the transistor radio did for sound. Sony was the first to develop

an all-transistor television, in 1959. At a time when the trend

in television receivers was toward larger screens, Sony produced

extremely small models with eight-inch screens. Ignoring the marketing

experts who said that Americans would never buy such a

product, Sony introduced these models into the United States in

1960 and found that there was a huge demand for them.

As in radio, the number of television stations on the air and

broadcasts for the viewer to choose from grew.Apersonal television

or radio gave the audience more choices. Instead of one machine in

the family room, there were now several around the house. The

transistorization of mechanical entertainers allowed each family

member to choose his or her own entertainment. Sony learned several

important lessons from the success of the transistor radio and

television. The first was that small size and low price could create

new markets for electronic consumer products. The second was that

constant innovation and cost reduction were essential to keep ahead

of the numerous companies that produced cheaper copies of original

Sony products.

In 1962, Sony introduced a tiny television receiver with a fiveinch

screen. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, it produced even smaller models,

until it had a TV set that could sit in the palm of the hand—the

Video Walkman. Sony’s scientists had developed an entirely new

television screen that worked on a new principle and gave better

color resolution; the company was again able to blend the fruits of

basic scientific research with innovative industrial engineering.

The transistorized amplifier unit used in radio and television sets

was applied to other products, including amplifiers for record players

and tape recorders. Japanese manufacturers were slow to take

part in the boom in high-fidelity audio equipment that began in the

United States in the 1950’s. The leading manufacturers of highquality

audio components were small American companies based

on the talents of one engineer, such as Avery Fisher or Henry Koss.

They sold expensive amplifiers and loudspeakers to audiophiles.

The transistor reduced the size, complexity, and price of these components.

The Japanese took the lead devising complete audio units based on transistorized

integrated circuits, thus developing the basic home stereo.

In the 1960’s, companies such as Sony and Matsushita dominated

the market for inexpensive home stereos. These were the basic

radio/phonograph combination, with two detached speakers.

The finely crafted wooden consoles that had been the standard for

the home phonograph were replaced by small plastic boxes. The

Japanese were also quick to exploit the opportunities of the tape cassette.

The Philips compact cassette was enthusiastically adopted by

Japanese manufacturers and incorporated into portable tape recorders.

This was another product with its ancestry in the transistor

radio. As more of them were sold, the price dropped, encouraging

more consumers to buy. The cassette player became as commonplace

in American society in the 1970’s as the transistor radio had

been in the 1960’s.





The Walkman



The transistor took another step in miniaturization in the Sony

Walkman, a personal stereo sound system consisting of a cassette

player and headphones. It was based on the same principles as the

transistor radio and television. Sony again confounded marketing

experts by creating a new market for a personal electronic entertainer.

In the ten years following the introduction of theWalkman in

1979, Sony sold fifty million units worldwide, half of those in the

United States. Millions of imitation products were sold by other

companies.

Sony’s acquisition of the Western Electric transistor technology

was a turning point in the fortunes of that company and of Japanese

manufacturers in general. Less than ten years after suffering defeat

in a disastrous war, Japanese industry served notice that it had lost

none of its engineering capabilities and innovative skills. The production

of the transistor radio was a testament to the excellence of

Japanese research and development. Subsequent products proved

that the Japanese had an uncanny sense of the potential market for

consumer products based on transistor technology. The ability to incorporate

solid-state electronics into innovative home entertainment

products allowed Japanese manufacturers to dominate the

world market for electronic consumer products and to eliminate

most of their American competitors.

The little transistor radio was the vanguard of an invasion of new

products unparalleled in economic history. Japanese companies

such as Sony and Panasonic later established themselves at the leading

edge of digital technology, the basis of a new generation of entertainment

products. Instead of Japanese engineers scraping together

the money to buy a license for an American technology, the

great American companies went to Japan to license compact disc

and other digital technologies.



William Shockley



William Shockley’s reputation contains extremes. He helped

invent one of the basic devices supporting modern technological

society, the transistor. He also tried to revive one of the most

infamous social theories, eugenics.

His parents, mining engineer William Hillman Shockley,

and surveyor May Bradford Shockley, were on assignment in

England in 1910 when he was born. The family returned to

Northern California when the younger William was three, and

they schooled him at home until he was eight. He acquired an

early interest in physics from a neighbor who taught at Stanford

University. Shockley pursed that interest at the California Institute

of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

which awarded him a doctorate in 1936.

Shockley went to work for Bell Telephone Laboratories in

the same year. While trying to design a vacuum tube that could

amplify current, it occurred to him that solid state components

might work better than the fragile tubes. He experimented with

the semiconductors germanium and silicon, but the materials

available were too impure for his purpose. World War II interrupted

the experiments, and he worked instead to improve radar

and anti-submarine devices for the military. Back at Bell

Labs in 1945, Shockley teamed with theorist John Bardeen and

experimentalistWalter Brattain. Two years later they succeeded

in making the first amplifier out of semiconductor materials

and called it a transistor (short for transfer resistor). Its effect on

the electronics industry was revolutionary, and the three shared



the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement.

In the mid-1950’s Shockley left Bell Labs to start Shockley

Transistor, then switched to academia in 1963, becoming Stanford

University’s Alexander M. Poniatoff Professor of Engineering

and Applied Science. He grew interested in the relation

between race and intellectual ability. Teaching himself psychology

and genetics, he conceived the theory that Caucasians were

inherently more intelligent than other races because of their genetic

make-up. When he lectured on his brand of eugenics, he

was denounced by the public as a racist and by scientists for



shoddy thinking. Shockley retired in 1975 and died in 1989.







See also : 



Cassette recording; Color television; FM radio; Radio;Television;



Further Reading :



Lyons, Nick. The Sony Vision. New York: Crown Publishers, 1976.

Marshall, David V. Akio Morita and Sony. Watford: Exley, 1995.

Morita, Akio, with Edwin M. Reingold, and Mitsuko Shimomura.

Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony. London: HarperCollins,

1994.

Reid, T. R. The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and

Launched a Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

Riordan, Michael. Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the

Birth of the Information Age. New York: Norton, 1998.

Scott, Otto. The Creative Ordeal: The Story of Raytheon. New York:

Atheneum, 1974.