The phrase ‘made in Japan’ didn’t used to have the same air of superiority that it does nowadays. In the fifties, products made in Japan were generally considered to be undesirable. They were thought of as cheap, poorly-built imitations of the higher quality products being manufactured over here in the West. 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.
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 without it, we might not even be here today.
There’s no better example of our continuing innovation than the story behind the TR-55. 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. Ibuka and Morita flew back and forth to the States numerous times, but Western Electrics were sceptical of the duo’s ambitious vision. 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.”
But despite warnings from the experts, Ibuka and Morita were persistent with their goal. 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’”. 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.
We’re still producing radios to this day, each one an homage to the original TR-55 transistor radio. In fact, the C1 and C1T clock radios are two of our best-selling products.
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. 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.
