Sony Founded in Tokyo: The Electronics Revolution Begins

Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita started their company in a bombed-out department store in downtown Tokyo with about $530 in capital and twenty employees who had no idea what they would make. Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation, was founded on May 7, 1946, in a Japan still occupied by American forces, its cities flattened, its economy shattered, and its industrial base dismantled for reparations. Ibuka, the engineer, and Morita, the physicist and businessman, had met during the war while working on heat-seeking weapons research. Ibuka's first commercial product was a rice cooker that frequently burned the rice. The early months were a scramble to find any viable product, from voltmeters to electrical heating pads. Revenue came from modifying radio receivers to pick up shortwave broadcasts, a service in demand during the occupation. The breakthrough came in 1950, when Ibuka learned that Western Electric was licensing transistor technology. He traveled to the United States and secured a license for $25,000, then spent two years figuring out how to manufacture transistors reliably enough for consumer products. American companies were using transistors primarily for military and telephone applications. Ibuka's team saw a different possibility: a radio small enough to carry in a pocket. The TR-55, Japan's first transistor radio, launched in 1955. The TR-63, marketed globally in 1957, was small enough to fit in a shirt pocket and cost $29.95. American teenagers bought them by the millions. The company changed its name to Sony in 1958, combining "sonus," the Latin word for sound, with "sonny," American slang that Morita thought projected youthful energy. Sony's trajectory from that bombed-out store to global electronics dominance proceeded through a series of products that defined their categories: the first home videotape recorder (1965), the Trinitron color television (1968), the Walkman portable cassette player (1979), the compact disc (co-developed with Philips, 1982), and the PlayStation (1994). A company born in the rubble of war became synonymous with Japanese technological innovation and quality manufacturing.