When you think of Sony, you probably think of a technology company that’s been around forever. However, as [Asianometry] points out, it really formed in the tough years after World War II. The two people behind the company’s formation were an interesting pair. One of them was a visionary engineer and one was a consummate businessman.
While it is hard to imagine today, securing a license to produce transistors was difficult in the early days. What’s worse is, even with the license, it was not feasible to use the crude devices in a radio.
The devices were poor by today’s standards, and while transistors would work at audio frequencies for hearing aids, getting them to work at AM radio frequencies was a challenge. The Sony founders had to decide whether to use alloy transistors or grown crystal transistors.
Western Electric did not want to share its crystal-growing technology, so in 1954, the team created an alloy transistor. However, it failed to work well at radio frequencies, so they shifted to growing crystals, which seemed more amenable to scaling. One of the team tried using phosphorous and indium doping and created a transistor that could work at higher frequencies. But there was a problem.
Despite the transistor’s superior performance, they couldn’t make another one. Common wisdom at the time was that phosphorus doping was a dead end, but it had worked once. It just took time to find the right way to do it. By 1955, they produced usable transistors, even though the yield was at around 5%.
Texas Instruments beat them to market with a transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, in 1954, but in 1955, Sony produced the TR-55. Of the five transistors inside, some were alloyed transistors, and some were grown crystals. The factory had to hand-select crystal transistors to make each unit work. The radios were on sale for about 19,000 yen (the TR-1 cost about 50 bucks; recall that in 1954, that was nearly $600 in today’s money). Adjusting for inflation, in today’s money, a Japanese teenager would shell out about $850 for the TR-55.
The TR-55 wasn’t the first Sony radio to have transistors. The TR-52 was a prototype, but it had case problems and never made it into the hands of the public. The radio didn’t make it to the United States until 1957. By then, Texas Instruments, Raytheon, and GE all had radios available, too.
It is a fascinating look into the history of an iconic electronics brand and a window into another world that, honestly, wasn’t that long ago. We couldn’t help but note similarities with Apple, who also had a businessman and engineer combination. Sony would go on to innovate in a number of areas, including optical data storage.
A great Sony transistor story: in the 1960s Sony invented a very small transistor radio. So small it was portable! They wanted to emphasize how small it was so they decided to sell it in America as a pocket radio.
The problem was it really was too big for your pocket. So they made special shirts for their salesmen that had extra large pockets.
Apparently transistor radios became so popular that in the 60s “transistor” was slang for “radio” for a while.
Yes I remember people talkng about bringing their transistor, meaning radio. At the time a radio was a big box with tubes/valves in that you needed to plug into a wall socket. Small speakers meant awful tinny sound, much like playing music thru a smartphone these days. They were a bit of a nuisance as young people took them to parks, beaches etc – playing music in those environments was a novelty.
Not always. The Brown SK2 radio from Germany was both modern looking and quite compact.
The issue rather was that development of tubes had been neglected after transistor was made.
Especially ads from the US made fun of tube technology, I recall.
There had been sort of an obsession with “solid state” technology.
The comparisons weren’t fair, either.
Because objectively speaking, battery tubes with 6,3v heating (lower is better for tube life) and 12v anode voltage were quite good.
Too bad battery development wasn’t on same level it is now.
If lithium rechargeables had been available back then, then the heating power of a tube wouldn’t have mattered.
The EF98 battery tube comes to mind, it had been in use in German radio construction kits, like the 1960s Radiomann (sold under different name in France and US, too).
The EF98 was a car radio tube and quite easy to use. It was also known as 6Ж40П or 6ET6.
The slightly different EF95 is still being made or available as NOS, or so I heard.
It had been used in russian military applications, or so I heard.
Speaking of, UdSSR had keept using and developing tube technology much longer than the west.
Which wasn’t bad per se, since tubes could handle EMPs, for example. Or handling strong RF signals without getting deaf.
These tubes were miniature models, also. Not the big clunky types used in grandfather’s steam radio.
There had been tiny tubes with soldering leads, even, which didn’t require tube sockets.
I often wonder how thing would have developed if that solid state craze hadn’t happened. If people didn’t give up on tube tech for mo good reason.
The field-effect transistor could have been skipped, the Nuvistor might have been used in computer chips, running at much higher speeds than a transistor.
“The Brown SK2 radio from Germany ”
Just wanted to mention that it’s ‘Braun’ and not ‘Brown’. ;)
It was meant as a subtle joke. ^^
People gave up on tubes for good reasons:
1. Tubes are large. Using the smallest tube ever made, the computer you use would be the size of a large town.
2. Tubes are ineffecient. Nearly all of the heat generated by the filament is waste. Only a tiny bit of the energy to the filament actually does anything for the tube function.
3. Tube filaments burn out – often.
4. Tubes crack and leak – once air gets in, they don’t work right (or at all.)
How would you like to have to search literally millions of tubes in a tube operated computer to find the ones that have crapped out?
You’ve got a hangup on tubes. Yeah, a tube circuit can sound nice. So what?
None of the modern world could happen with tubes.
They do serve a role in quite some scientific equipment, but that’s not entirely fair because those are not fulfulling the role a transistor does nowadays. For a “transistor” application vacuum tubes are still in use for very high power radio transmitters and such.
Well, as earlier pointed out, battery tubes and Nuvistors were different animals.
By lowering the heating voltage from 6,3v to 5 or 4,5v would extend the tube life a lot, between 10 to 100 times.
The Nuvistor barely generated any heat. It was found in high-end microphones and lab equipment, such as spectrum analyzers.
Up until the 1980s, about 20 years after Nuvistor development had halted. That’s how much ahead of it times it was.
If development had continued.. who knowns. It’s as with medicine. No market, no more research. Who cares about people? ‘It’s the money, babe’.
The halt on development on tube technology was because of money, because of solid-state ideology. It was cheaper to produce, required less skills.
Tube making was like glass making, it required fine mechanical qualities and good production sites. Transistors could be made like Coca Cola cans. Which matches their cultural level, too.
Quality wise, in the 1950s, 60s and early 70s, the transistor was behind the tube.
Tubes had higher transit frequencies, lower noise floor, more robustness against electrical interference.
And these are no rosetintent memories here. Tubes had been more fragile mechanically, less electrically. The transistor was other way round.
The field-effect was closest to the tube, but early types up until the 1970s could easily die from ESD. Their only worthwhile application was in spy bugs, hi..
The truth is that if you you spend enough money that “often” can be reduce. In the end everything will eventually fail even transistors. The doping never actually stops and over very very long time at room temperature the silicon will eventually become homogeneous. This process is faster at elevated temperature and smaller physically smaller scale.
Those starved voltage tube tuners managed to pull it off which saved some parts but they failed at doing any real power for audio output. The first transistor class A doorknob transistor had to do it. I remember portable battery tube radios as real wimps for getting loud even when plugged in.
RCA produced Nuvistor vacuum tubes in the 1960s and 1970s. Nuvistors were metal envelope tubes about the same size as CK722 transistors. Medium mu Nuvistors could operate at UHF and above frequencies. In fact, there’s a Nuvistor employed as the sampling gate in the Tektronix 1S1 equivalent time sampling plug-in capable of displaying a 1 GHz periodic waveform. I have a 1S1 mounted in a Tek 547 oscilloscope mainframe.
Nuvistors employed a “dark” cathode operating at temperature of 350 K. Still, the heater consumed 135 mA at 6.3 Volts (0.85 Watts). Plate voltage was between 24 and 125 Volts depending on the tube and application. The following data sheet from June 1963 quite prominently mentions EMP survivability as a rationale for choosing Nuvistors. I often read that the Soviets were more aware of nuclear detonation hazards, but it apparent that by June 1963, it was a concern in the US too.
https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Catalogs/RCA/RCA-Nuvistor-Tubes-1963.pdf
1.5 volt filaments for battery operation were a thing.
The electronic-component-versus-radio reminds me that when I was a kid an “electronics store” sold electronic components and tools and books and soldering equipment. My heart still skips a beat occasionally when someone mentions an electronics store – then my brain catches up and I remember that they’re really talking about an audio store or an appliance store.
I wonder how much of the blame for that situation falls on Radio Shack…
The 6th paragraph implies TI made the 1st radio and later the TR-55 but that seems to be Sony. I’m confused.
Right, the video explains it better. TI produced the TR-1 and Sony later the TR-55. Got it.
Yes, the first sentence of that paragraph is very confusing. What it actually says is not at all what the writer intended it to say.
“So they made special shirts for their salesmen that had extra large pockets.”
Cool, never really knew that there was a standard pocket size, how convenient. If there only was a true standard for the rest of the sizes of clothing, that way when you know your size, you can pick it off the shelf and buy it. Which saves you the need for for waiting in line for 20 minutes, before you cram yourself in a tight space with a partially failing curtain in order to see if it fits, which it doesn’t, so you need to leave the fitting room to pick another piece of clothing (size+1) and if they have it, get back in line again in order to repeat the procedure. Who doesn’t like shopping for clothes…
Shoes are slightly better, but only because there is no fitting room required (accuracy of the standard still sucks). I would plead for a accuracy value after the size. Like for shoes 43+20%, I would happily pay more for a higher accuracy when ordering online. Hey, if it works for resistors, why not for anything else.
And that’s why I always pick three different sizes each time I go to the fitting room… 🤨
there was an item in an april issue of byte magazine touting pocket-sized floppies, based on a shirt that had an 8″ pocket.
As any fule know, the standard pocket size is the width of an IBM card (or a pack of Marlboros)
Inre: pocket size
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/12274/Hewlett-Packard-HP-35/
Market studies at the time had shown no market for pocket sized calculators as they would be too expensive. In about 1970, HP co-founder Bill Hewlett challenged his co-workers to create a “shirt-pocket sized HP-9100”. Thus, the first 12 HP-35 portable calculators were made as a “hack” by and for other engineers at HP. It is rumoured that the development engineer got carried away and implemented a full suite of scientific functions to satisfy requests from his co-workers. When these prototypes proved popular, HP decided to turn the HP-35 into a commercial product. The HP-35 was exactly 5.8 inches long and 3.2 inches wide. This was the size of William Hewlett’s shirt pocket, hence “pocket calculator”.
In the 1960s Buck Owens had a country song with the line “my transistor radio comes from far away” – obviously by then Japan had completely dominated the market
Here in Australia, one of our greatest bands Cold Chisel had a song ‘Rising Sun’ off the album ‘East’ with the line “They’re buying our beaches, sellin′ transistors”.
As I recall, at the time the technical challenge was making pure germanium crystals, in bombed out buildings with not much for equipment, Czochralski method I thought. They eventually copied and Sony was able to make decent transistors with seed and assistance from USA. The IP was given away back then. Asian women were incredible at hand assembling transistors, their have visual acuity and hand coordination for working with very small parts.
Women, in general, are quite often the ones who do precision assembly. Almost all women in the minicomputer manufacturing plants I worked in back in the 70s. Perhaps it was the hours, perhaps the companies wanted women, perhaps men didn’t want the jobs, which were repetitive and required diligent concentration.
Likewise, Oak Ridge Labs using High School girls to monitor the centrifuges.
They did a better job than the scientists.
(If for no other reason the scientists wondered “what would happen if I did this?”)
One of my buddies moms did that. Spent her day watching a meter dial and turning a knob to keep the meter centered.
It makes you wonder why the process was not more automated. The only thing I can think of it if the automation wonked out it might be a long time before anybody realized it. Also the humans could report if even the feel of the control changed.
Or maybe because they could be paid less…
OTOH, $ony TVs back in the early 1980s were a pain to work on for a non-$ony trained TV repairman. They used non-standard transistors and non-transistor logic, their transistors did not cross reference generic transistors. PITA!
And their licensing of their VCR, and other formats (e.g. Memory Stick, AIBO)
has left a permanent sour taste in my mouth.
Not to mention the rootkit.
Despite lusting after their tasteful designs I decided a long time ago never to buy Sony.
I got me one of the first 5mp cameras and at that point in time it was a shootout between sony and minokta. Sony used memory sticks and a custom battery, milolta used tf cards and AA cells.
I got the minolta and I recalled when I first got it I think I had an 8 meg card that would hold perhaps 25 images, but that was OK as even with single use lithium cells that was about all you got out of a pair. But time and tech got better, and by the time I stopped using that camera I had a 256 meg card that was like limitless storage and the rechargeable aa’s were hitting over 2000 mah so that camera really grew into it. The poor sony owners, sony nevr sold enough of the memory sticks to bring the price down and they were stuck with battery tech that was sadly outdated.
I do recall one time when I first got it trying $1 batteries in it and I got exactly one shot. I think it was an 8 pack though and if I recall right the camera used 4 so I got 2 shots for my buck.
Back in the 1990s I bought a Fujifilm digital camera that used four AA cells and recorded on a semi flexible memory card about the size of a postage stamp. I’ve also got a 3.5 inch floppy disk size card reader which allowed the memory cards to be read and written using a 1.44 megabyte floppy drive via program for Microsoft Windows which installed a temporary driver. It was actually a pretty neat method of transferring files bidirectional and worked well.
The Fujifilm camera ate batteries. If you used NiMH cells, you could snap about 8 pictures before needing to swap in fresh cells.
The history of the transistor discovery is told in the book “Crystal fire”, one of my favorites.
My dad visited the US from India in the mid-60s. He took back with him a small portable radio as a gift for his cousin. I can absolutely attest that at the time “transistor” was synonymous with “portable radio”. I have often wondered why that was so…..now I realize the connection: miniaturization enabled by solid state technology.
I have a Belmont tube radio, which is only slightly larger than the iPhone 12 Pro Max and smaller than many transistor radios