Masaru Ibuka, a lifelong collector of model trains, ham radios, and helium balloons, was the engineering genius behind the first Japanese transistor radio, and later the Trinitron and the Walkman—and the cofounder of Sony Corporation. Associated Press.
It took a while for the company’s accounting chief, a dour man sent down from Nagoya to look after the family’s investment, to sign off on the project. Morita and Ibuka infamously took him to a black market restaurant and got him drunk enough to agree. Once the money was available, the team sat down to solve the technical challenges.
Obtaining tape was the greatest problem, and from the outset the company decided it should manufacture the tape, rightly anticipating that owners of the recorders would need to buy ever more reels of the stuff. The plastic that was used in the American recorders was simply not available in Japan. Cellophane, which could be found, stretched, and so was useless. The only other available substance that could be magnetized was paper. So a specialized papermaking company was found in Osaka, thousands of sheets of the smoothest available craft paper were ordered, and Morita and Ibuka settled down to cut them into countless narrow strips.
The strips were then glued together and laid out on the factory floor—hundreds of feet of them, weighted to stop them from blowing about. All thirty-six of the company employees—the voltmeter business had nearly doubled the staff count—now armed with brushes made of fine raccoon belly hair, fell to their knees and, their heads bowed like monks in a scriptorium, applied with infinite care a magnetic paste concocted from a mixture of ferric oxide and geisha-quality white face powder. There was a down-home aspect to the business: the ferric oxide had been cooked up in frying pans; the powder had been bought wholesale from a cosmetics company.
The resulting pasted tape was left overnight to dry, and then tested the next morning by being run over magnets connected to speakers. The result was the so-called talking paper—fragile, scratchily imperfect in the first tests, but increasingly more workable as the cutters and the gluers and the brush wielders got better at their tasks. The acceptable batches were then wound onto reels, and these were placed on a hefty machine that had been cobbled together from motors and magnets, and was equipped with an external microphone and a built-in loudspeaker.
Finally, here was the prototype of the Totsuko Company’s G-type tape recorder, a bulky hundred-pound confection of steel and copper and glass and raccoon-hair-pasted paper tape. It worked, quite reliably. It would both record and play back whatever the microphone picked up. So the firm painstakingly hand-built fifty recorders, priced at 160,000 yen each—more than twice what was then the annual Japanese salary—and then crossed its corporate fingers. The dour Morita Company accounting chief, back again from the countryside and by now wise enough to remain sober, waited nervously to see how the market would react and whether his masters’ investment was secure.
If it was, it was more by luck than judgment. Sales were painfully slow. Everyone who saw and heard the device was impressed. A noodle shop bought the very first and tried to encourage a primitive form of karaoke, which drew in crowds of diners. But few others wanted something so heavy or so costly.
The company then began doing what it subsequently became famous for, something that the Japanese people had been doing for centuries: shrinking things. The old notions—the neatly nested lacquered box, the tightly concertina’d fan, the foldable-to-nothing room screen—were for the first time translated into this electronic corner of the Japanese corporate world. The first giant tape recorder—those few of the original fifty that did sell went to the government and into the courts, for transcription—was cunningly distilled into something that was neater, lighter, and very much smaller. This second version was called the Model H, for “home.” It weighed just thirty pounds and cost eight thousand yen. It was followed by the Model M, which was designed to suit the fledgling movie industry; and finally, by the truly popular and successful Model P, a cheap and miraculously how-do-they-do-it? lightweight portable tape recorder, with a shoulder strap and an appearance of near-chic modernity—which started selling at the rate of six thousand units each year.
With figures like these, and the firm’s newfound ability to come up with new and smaller models and then swivel its production lines to satisfy public demand at what seemed a moment’s notice, the little company could afford to rent more space and hire more people. By the end of the 1940s, Totsuko had a staff of almost five hundred and had expanded offices in a former barrack block in a hilly western suburb, where the company is still based six decades later.
Shrinking the product seemed to have been the key. The engineers who mastered the mysteries of squeezing more and more features into smaller and smaller volumes were the early heroes of the story. But in later years, they were to be greatly assisted by an invention from the late 1940s—an American invention, as it happens—that would allow the small to be made tiny, the tiny minuscule, and for a real electronic revolution to get itself properly under way.
This was the transistor. This small, simple, and now all too easily made electronic amplifying device is widely accepted as one of the greatest of all modern inventions. It is an essential in the making of all today’s computers, is key to the birth of the Pacific coast technologies of Microsoft and Apple and more generally of Silicon Valley (so named, since 1974, as silicon is the transistor’s core material), and helped light the fuse of Japan’s postwar success. It was invented, all agree, on December 23, 1947. A trio of electronics engineers, who would later win the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery, made the first working transistor where they were employed, at Bell Labs, in Murray Hill (a New Jersey suburb founded by a spritzer maker who had migrated there from Murray Hill, in Manhattan). It was one of the last gasps of Atlantic coast inventiveness in a field of technology that would become increasingly dominated by the much greater ocean to the west.
It took Drs. Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley2 years of intense application to maneuver the tiny slivers of semiconducting germanium and the even tinier conducting electrodes of pure gold leaf into performing their magical feats of amplification. But once they had achieved this world-changing miracle, the vacuum tube (that fragile, hot, cumbersome, and slow-to-warm-up valve that had managed to switch and amplify electrical signals before) was effectively retired, to be replaced by the semiconductor and the new-made transistor. Once such transistor-based circuitry could be integrated onto single pieces of silicon, eventually allowing thousands and then millions of transistors to be etched onto a slice of semiconductor no larger than a fingernail, the modern high-technology world, or at least a substantial part of it, began to assume the complexion it still has today.
Masaru Ibuka became immediately intrigued by what he learned of the transistor. News of its invention trickled into the Japanese papers, though initially the only suggested use most could imagine—a use that took advantage of its tininess—was in the making of hearing aids, which were seldom worn in Japan. So in 1952, when Ibuka went on his first-ever journey to the United States—“[A] stunning country!” he reported. “Really fantastic. Buildings brightly lit. Streets jammed with automobiles”—he was not initially bound for Murray Hill. The sole official purpose of his expedition was to see how tape recorders, then still the company’s core (and really, only) business, were being used.
He worked hard. He discovered many new uses for the recorder, and each time, he sent telegrams back to Tokyo demanding action, and Morita would invariably comply. One suggestion was to start making recordings in stereo. Within days, Morita’s engineers had solved some trivial technical