The Incredible Story Behind the First Transistor Radio

[ChrisSmolinski]

Imagine if your boss called a meeting in May to announce that he’s committing 10 percent of the company’s revenue to the development of a brand-new mass-market consumer product, made with a not-yet-ready-for-mass-production component. Oh, and he wants it on store shelves in less than six months, in time for the holiday shopping season. Ambitious, yes. Kind of nuts, also yes.

But that’s pretty much what Pat Haggerty, vice president of Texas Instruments, did in 1954. The result was the Regency TR-1, the world’s first commercial transistor radio, which debuted 70 years ago this month.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/transistor-radio-invented

[n2avh]

Very cool article, thanks! I did laugh when they explain what a superheterodyne receiver was on an IEEE website, but I guess it is for non-specialist readers. Or maybe analog is so alien to what today's IEEE members understand that it needs to be explained even to specialists! 

[ThaDood]

I'll have to look for the article again, where Sony ran with the pocket radio, where it was more affordable for the masses.  TI certainly laid-out the ground work in pioneering that. I happened to see that when researching Sony Trinitron color TV history, since I worked in Toshiba's CRT manufacturing +30 years ago. Sadly, even Sony is now pretty much an empty husk of what it used to be.