at Bell Labs, to cause them to lose face also. Respect for others, for elders, for perceived betters—these were concepts similarly central to Chinese and Japanese thinking: while it was dangerously uncomfortable to lose face yourself, it was unforgivably shameful to cause another to lose face. So, at first, timidity ruled in the Totsuko laboratories on the floors high above the tape recorder production line. Everyone was nervous, and for many weeks during 1953 and the first months of 1954, nothing very much was done, and less was accomplished.
Such hesitancy sorely tested Ibuka and his team of leaders, all of whom were doing their best to spur the scientists upstairs to do their best. Months after their successful purchase of the Western Electric transistor license, it was starting to seem as if they might never create anything better than the American model.
They seemed unable in particular to take the radical steps necessary to achieve the one technically risky but most commercially vital thing: to create a unique kind of transistor that was powerful enough and would work at a high enough frequency to allow the miniature radio set that Masaru Ibuka demanded his company manufacture to work. And this was causing major problems for the accountants. The income from the tape recorder business might still be healthy, but the burn rate (the payment of salaries to all these scientists and engineers who for all these complicated reasons were achieving rather little) was getting out of hand.
Months ensued, of cajolery and chemistry, of patience and physics. Ibuka and Iwama continued to write home from America, cabling their more urgent instructions for making the needed transistors. BUY HEAVY DUTY DIFFUSION FURNACE, one cable read. ACQUIRE DIAMOND GRINDER FOR SLICING GERMANIUM CRYSTALS, read another. Then, slowly, beating against the undertow of traditional thinking, the team in Japan started to nudge its way toward success. The timid became the tentative. Hesitancy morphed into determination, and the dragging weight of mentsu began to evaporate. Progress started, and through the mist the vision of the true Japanese transistor started to solidify.
The first device was completed late in the summer of 1954, while Ibuka and Iwama were still in America. It was in essence just a fair copy of that made at Bell Labs—a so-called point-contact transistor, primitive and not so small. But the principle was established: the needle on the detecting oscillator swung, with all watching nervously, indicating that the gadget was indeed creating an amplified output. By the time Iwama arrived back home, the team already had a more sophisticated model, a junction-type transistor with a perfectly cut germanium crystal—sliced with a rusty old cutting machine that had been found out in the rain in a Tokyo suburb—that was making the oscillator swing its needle even more vehemently. The little company that could was finally on its way to perfecting an invention.
The technology behind what is now an entirely routine procedure—even if we don’t entirely understand what they are doing, we are well accustomed now to seeing images of workers in protective suits in brilliantly lit, clean rooms, directing the etching of tiny circuits onto minuscule slices of semiconducting material—was, in the 1950s, dauntingly complex. But using a procedure that Bell Labs had tried and discarded, a technique known as phosphorous doping, Totsuko eventually made the breakthrough it had long sought.
In June 1955, six months after the Iwama expedition to America, the company set up its first grown-crystal transistor production line. In the first weeks, maybe only five in a hundred of them worked; Ibuka’s sanguine view was that so long as a single transistor worked, then perfecting the production technique could be accomplished at the very same time that production was under way. So the button was pressed, the factory started producing, and hundreds of tiny radio-frequency, high-powered, grown-crystal, phosphorous-doped Japanese-made transistors began cascading off the line.
Now all the company had to do was make a radio to put them in; to establish a brand name under which to market and sell this radio; and then proceed to change the lives of millions. This is what Ibuka demanded, and this is what he, Kazuo Iwama, and Akio Morita achieved.
There were hiccups, of course. An American company based in Indianapolis, named Regency, launched the first-ever transistor radio, the TR-1, in October 1954. “See it! Hear it! Get it!” blared the advertisements. Jewelry stores in New York and Los Angeles sold the sleek little sets for $49.95. The TR-1 sold well initially, but performed poorly: radio reception was often scratchy, and the set ran out of power too quickly to be of much use.
The first-ever Totsuko radio rolled off the production line in the spring of 1955. Called the TR-52, it was a tall rectangle, the size of a large cigarette packet. The four hundred square holes of its white plastic speaker grille looked like tiny windows, leading critics to say it resembled Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer’s UN headquarters, opened in New York two years before, and causing the radio to be called “the UN Building.” Totsuko made a hundred of them, but the TR-52 never went on sale, because the grille bent and peeled off in hot weather. It was, or could have been, a major embarrassment.
However, the Bulova Watch Company saw the prototype—in cool weather, presumably—and very much liked the concept. Buoyed by the news of Regency’s very modest success, Bulova reached out to Morita and ordered one hundred thousand of his radios, a staggering number.
Yet, to the dismayed astonishment of all back in Japan, Morita balked. He refused to take the order as offered. He did so because the American firm declared that it wanted to sell the radio in America under the Bulova name—and to that, Morita, a proud man, simply would not and could not agree. Especially since, just a few days prior to receiving the order, he and his colleagues had decided to rename their company, to call it Sony.
The employment of the name Sony came about entirely because of the American market. Morita had found that almost no one in the United States could pronounce either Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, the company’s formal name, or its diminutive, Totsuko. Something easier was needed, he wrote in a company memo. Something short; four-lettered, if possible. Something memorable, like “Ford.”
The Totsuko principals explored only modestly, searching either for an existing word or for an arbitrary word—Kodak, created at the whim of George Eastman fifty years before, seemed an ideal. They thought of two-letter words, with which the Japanese language abounds, but to which English mainly consigns prepositions. They considered three-letter combinations (NBC, CBS, NHK). Perhaps their own existing initials, TTK, might work. But then they began to think of four-letter combinations. The name of Ford kept striking Morita as ideal, as being brand perfection—so he and Ibuka combed through their various dictionaries. As to whether they had a Latin dictionary to hand, corporate history is silent; but somehow or other they eventually came across the Latin word for sound (the ultimate product of all their engineering), and liked what they found: the Latin word sonus. Five letters, true, but very nearly perfect.
Since 1928, when Al Jolson had sung, “Climb upon my knee, Sonny boy, / Though you’re only three, Sonny Boy,” the term Sonny had won widespread affection, especially in America. Occupation forces, now three years gone, would throw sticks of Wrigley’s gum to children, calling out, “There you are, sonny!” The word had pleasing connotations. It echoed the Latin word. It was easy to pronounce. It had universal appeal. And to make it into a Ford-like quadrilateral just a small modification in pronunciation and spelling was needed. Thus, in 1955, the word Sony was born. The word. The company. And history.
Stubborn to the end, Bulova refused to use the name on its products. “Who ever heard of Sony?” asked the president. Akio Morita politely replied, “Half a century ago people would have asked—who ever heard of Bulova?” But no ice was cut. The American’s heart did not melt. And so Morita, with exaggerated courtesy, left the office—without the precious order for a hundred thousand radios. If Japan’s first transistor radio was going to sell in America, then it would be called a Sony—and the Sony team would have to do their best to sell it themselves. The company’s future was now very much on the line.
A concatenation of curious events then got under way. The melting plastic
