Forget the Walkman! Sony's Revolutionary Radio 

Today people will ignorantly say, "it's just radio, it's outdated!" not understanding how important transistor radios were at changing society. Before radio and when radio first came along, EVERYONE listened to the same music, adults and children. There was only one "pop chart". Affordable personal transistor radios (and 45rpm records) meant young people could start choosing their own music, separate from their parents, which started the generational divide. And in the 1950s and 1960s, that meant Rock and Roll and Bebop Jazz. Racist segregation became harder to maintain when white teenage kids were willing to listen to Black artists.

I love these "origin story" type of videos, and you do them so well! Really enjoyed this, and as ever a great use of archive sources. Excellent video.

In my preparatory school in the 1960's, "transistors" were the absolute hype. If you had one, you were it. I pestered my parents for such a device and in 1966 got a Russian transistor radio made by SELGA for Christmas. It exuded huge build quality, with a real cowhide jacket that smelt strongly of the Connolly seats in the family Rover. That was my first love. To explain: At school, they were banned on pain of discipline. But then, we had transistor radios at home, where I would listen in my bed after dark to the BBC Home Service (which very soon became Radio 4) and very infrequently, the BBC Light Programme, but only in order to jiggle the tuner wheel.

What a fascinating story. I had no idea of the significance of the radio to the Sony brand. It seems amazing.

One of my aunt's had the gen 2 Regency transistor radio from the mid 1950's. I found it among her stuff, after she died. It worked for a while, but I can't remember; what became of it? Around 1965, transistor radios became dirt cheap. Before then, they were definitely considered a prestige item. Most radio until 1965, table, console, or portable, still used vacuum tubes, aka "valves", until then.

I love the fifties press materials.

As a former TI employee, I applaud your recognition of the Regency TR-1. The story behind the Sony products is fascinating. Great video, thank you.

The TR-55 is the holy grail of collectable transistor radios along with any of the pearlescent Regency TR-1s. The Sony TR-7 is similar to the 55 in its appearance.

Very well researched and the footage was brilliant. I really enjoyed learning about how Sony started.

I love how you cover subjects that I didn’t even know I’d be interested in!!!

Radio is as important to me as ever considering all that's state of the art technology today . indeed I have an Aiwa transistor radio still reliable after 30yrs.😊👍

I read Mr Morita biography and the electric rice boiler was the cornerstone of his success. A pot that heat water to boil vegetables, rice, pasta, noodles and anything else by using electric current as opposed to gas. You can't keep a good man down.

My pride and joy is a GEC Transistor 7 (that is the British GEC), the same model featured on the BBC programme "The Repair Shop". Mine has a capacitor dated December 1961 and has a wooden case, so only a few years after the early transistors with their production problems we have a set that still works over 60 years later. I paid 50p for it at a car boot sale. It is a powerful radio booming out the shipping forecast until they switch the transmitter off.

I still have a "two" transistor radio with speaker from around 1962. Sensitivity is not great but selectivity is surprisingly good. The output volume is decent, no faint at all. The internal design is higly optimized especially the front end transistor and several AF/RF transformers. These radios were apparently the japanese response to get around an US tax on imported devices containing more than two transistors, the goal was to reduce the flood of low cost japanese radios.

Great history video.

Car radios were practical already. After all you had a high amperage 6v power source and a vibrator to generate higher B+ voltages. Tube based car radios were pretty common all through the 1950s. Though Sony did produce some portable TVs with the transistor in the mid 60s, the TV largely stayed around as tube until about 1970. There were hybrid solid state/tube TV well into the 1970s, especially at the low end of the market. Really, what was more important than transistors for radios and TVs for that matter were solid state ICs. First it was just individual sections of a radio, but soon it was the entire radio was on a single chip with just a few support components. Same with TVs. The tuner was a large metal box with a fairly complex mechanical switching device with a tube or 2, gradually it disappear along with other circuits in the set. By the early 80s, you had most of the TV circuitry on a single chip. This did a lot for energy savings. A 24" color set in the 60s consumed like 350-500 watts. By the mid 80s, more like 50 watts. They became much, much more reliable too.

I own several Sony products. They are built to last. My home theatre sound system is very old by today's standards. It is 17 years old. My Sony TV is over ten years old. I have a Sony sound system in my car.

Nowadays computer processors have billions of transistors squeezed into a square inch of circuit board. The pace of change is incredible.

A few years ago I was collecting old radios. I sold them all but I kept my ITT Schaub-Lorenz Golf Europa from the mid seventies. This heavy brick is still working and has a wonderful sound. Thanks for the Sony story. 🇯🇵📻🇯🇵

I have the modern "pocket sized" unit displayed at the end of the video, the ICF-P27. In 2024 where streaming is the norm there is a sort of charm in letting a DJ pick music for you (only really applies to the smaller non-commercial stations) and not requiring a paid two-way internet connection to do so. It's also pretty power efficient, they claim almost 100 hours on 2AA batteries and it's still on the pair I put in it ~1.5 years ago. It's using a fairly modern tuner IC from Sanshin that people have claimed to be based on Digital Signal Processing but supposedly the decoding part is analog according to the Japanese product sheet and that apparently helps with the power efficiency. It's fun to fiddle with on my desk and I suppose I might get more use out of it once KEXP launches KEXC here in the SF Bay Area. I only wish it had FM Stereo but, then again, it was $25.

must apologise, when i clicked through the patreon link, i thought this was a Techmoan video - sorry &y

@2:00 Bell Labs could not patent the transistor because it violated a previous British patent. It's also why the actual first transistor had to disappear.

Bulova did manage to get a radio, branded with their own name. They sold a version of the Regency TR1.

You could easily pay 2-3-4 times the price for a transistor radio and be WAY out ahead after a couple of months of heavy listening.. High quality battery operated tube portables were very energy efficient, using about a watt sometimes less. The cheap ones were generally not as efficient. But another problem was that you need an A/B (filament voltage and circuit voltage) battery. They generally ran around $5 (at a time when an ounce of silver was 1 Dollar) and the A/B battery was useless once one section dropped to an unusable voltage. As a rule, you might get about 5 hours out of a five Dollar A/B battery. But a transistor radio could get 20 hours or more out of a single 9V battery or 4 double AA batteries, again, depending on the quality. The battery is where you would really save the money even on an expensive transistor set. This is also why so many farm and portable AM tube radios have tubes that are like new even today. They were just too much money to run. So they weren't run much.

Thanks for that, I knew about Sony being a big name in early transistor radios but had no idea of their involvement with transistors. Right to the end of the analogue radio era Sony knew how to make a radio better than anyone else.

The TR-55 was not sold in the United States but was sold in Canada (in very limited numbers) by Gendis (General Distributors). This is the company which placed the ad you show regarding the TR-63.

Sony’s next big move was the portable tape recorder.

My dad bought a Sony transistor radio about 1959, and although the price sounds cheap to most people today, that was a bit of a luxury item considering a lot of people earned less than $80.00 a week. To this day, I always call any very small radio a transistor radio

Just wanted to point out that $70 in 1957 dollars is equivalent to about $770 today. These things definitely weren’t cheap when they first came out.

Exceptional.

1:10 Wow, those 1920s radios were really expensive. Revolutionary was the loudspeaker cabinent (at further cost) to make headphones unnecssary but only really practical if your house was wired for electricity to not have to go through literally a ton of batteries.

I've been a Sony fan since 1982... There TVs are good but expensive.. their portable devices have become legendary..

The funny thing was they were offered the idea for the walkman because of their transistor radios.They never paid the designer so when he came up with the i-pod he offered it to apple,they stole the idea also but for short money to the designer they would of gotten i-tunes and the i-pod.The designer got a smile from the irony but would’ve preferred the money.

If you had large pockets, indeed! That Canadian ad for the TR-63 at the "Special Introductory Offer" of $69.50 would translate to over $700 in today's money! To think I recently bought a pocket "transistor" AM/FM/WB radio about the size of a pack of cigarettes, that seems to have thousands of transistors in the form of some generic DSP, for $10 USD just boggles the mind.

Jesus Christ how thin is that lady in the advert at the start!? Very sad indeed. I wonder what happened to her?

In the UK, the plan was to switch off analogue radio by 2015 but the latest thinking is no earlier than the 2030s, so when we are all forced to buy electric cars by then *, at least we can still listen on FM without DAB cutting out when passing trees, tall buildings and driving through tunnels. * I'd think it was a lot easier for the Government to pursuade people to pay £25 for a DAB radio by 2015 than £40K for an electric car by 2035, but that's politicians for you 😊

They should reissue the TR-55. I am sure sales would not be great, but it would just be a nice object.

My understanding is that AT&T - as a monopoly - was pressured by the US government into licensing the transistor, despite it being a prize discovery. So they did so grudgingly, thinking that selling the rights to a company on the other side of the world that made rice cookers wouldn't be anything to worry about.

I have no idea who Bulova is?

Wow, the origins of Sony, almost more interesting than the radio Another version of the 'calculator wars'

Sony makes great products

Sony? Never hear of em (looking at my Bulova Playstation, oh wait...). 🤣

Was it DAB?

😭🤔🙏🏽♎🔒🤕 Sony walk 0:26

So... what has happened to Sony? It barely exists today as a hardware maker. Is it going the way of Philips?

WRONG ! 'SONY' = 'Standard Oil New York'.. When the CEO went to Chase Bank in NYC, to ask for a loan, Rockafeller said the company's Japanese name would be rejected by the general public, so he suggested 'SONY', which is the acronym for the famous Rockafeller owned 'Standard Oil of New York' ! That is the real story