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Likewise, AT&T licensed the transistor to a small Japanese startup and told them it would probably only be useful for making a hearing aid. Fortunately, Sony ha

Likewise, AT&T licensed the transistor to a small Japanese startup and told them it would probably only be useful for making a hearing aid. Fortunately, Sony had a knack for finding consumer applications of the device and humanity now makes quadrillions of transistors every year.

jjeaff 3y ago
quadrillions (a quadrillion is 1,000 trillions) seemed a bit high to me, so I looked it up. it's actually about 2 Billion Trillion a year.
eesmith 3y ago
That account does not appear to be true. From "Technology Importation, Corporate Strategies, and the Rise of the Japanese Semiconductor Industry in the 1950s" at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256067/pdf https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256067/pdf > In March 1952, Ibuka traveled to the United States to investigate its domestic tape-recorder market and to learn from American firms. It was during this trip that Ibuka ran across a WE newsletter announcing that AT&T was openly licensing its transistor patents for a nominal licensing fee of $25,000. Literally overnight, he decided that transistor radios should be Sony’s next major product. ... Iwama and Tsukamoto, along with three other researchers, officially began Sony’s transistor-development project in July 1953, just months before the company signed a patent-licensing agreement with AT&T (Sony Corporation, 1986, p. 325). (If that is not accessible, https://project.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/kikkawa/iss-6.pdf https://project.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/kikkawa/iss-6.pdf says Sony "Concludes transistor license agreement with Western Electric" in October 1953. Western Electric was "the primary equipment manufacturer, supplier, and purchasing agent for the Bell System from 1881 until 1984" says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor points out AT&T "first used transistors in telecommunications equipment in the No. 4A Toll Crossbar Switching System in 1953" and "The first prototype pocket transistor radio was shown ... from August 29 to September 6, 1953." A quick look of publications of the time finds articles like this August 1952 piece from the Illinois Business Review : > The Electronic Department of the General Electric Company reports that a whole new electronics business is growing out of the development of the transistor, said to be a potential successor to the vacuum tube. Transistors are made of germanium, which is recovered as a byproduct in the smelting and refining of zinc ores. Since they contain no heated element they never “burn out” and last indefinitely. The giant digital computers, or magic brains, which now use several thousand vacuum tubes and occupy a large-size room can conceivably become small enough to be applied to everyday business and industrial problems as are comptometers. Most of the telephone, industrial control, and business machine applications can be filled by the transistor; it will become practical to build amplifiers for use on transoceanic telephone cables. The simplicity and ruggedness of the transistor will have a direct effect also on military electronics, especially on airborne equipment. or this October 1952 article on some of the uses of transistors - https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n137/mode/2up?q=transistor https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n137/mo... with the subtitle "look for them soon in pocket radios and TVs almost that small" and the comment " RCA has just announced that it has boosted the frequency of several units high enough for use in FM radios and TV sets." If you don't mind the high noise, the same 1952 issue includes a description of how you can build your own transistor radio, at https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n239/mode/2up?q=transistor https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n239/mo... . Hard to think Western Electric didn't know of any of these possibilities when discussing licensing with Sony.
- failbuffer 3y ago
  Very thorough, thank you My source was Chris Miller's /Chip War/: "Upon landing in the United States in 1953, Morita was shocked by the country’s vast distances, open spaces, and extraordinary consumer wealth, especially compared to the deprivation of postwar Tokyo. This country seems to have everything, Morita thought. In New York, he met AT&T executives who agreed to issue him a license to produce the transistor. They told him to expect to manufacture nothing more useful than a hearing aid." Certainly many Americans were aware of and were chasing the potential of transistors almost immediately. This is not incompatible with management at the top being slow to grasp same.
  - eesmith 3y ago
    The "Technology Importation, Corporate Strategies, and the Rise of the Japanese Semiconductor Industry in the 1950s" link says it was Western Electric ("the manufacturing arm of the Bell System") who did the licensing, so it technically should have been WE executives, yes? That may be a minor point, but you can also read that after Morita signed the patent license, he "returned to Tokyo with a few sample transistors, a piece of high-grade germanium crystal, and a copy of Transistor Technology." What was Transistor Technology? "After the first symposium, WE began to license the patent rights to manufacture transistors to anyone willing to pay a fee of $25,000, which was “to be applied as an advance against any future royalties [usually 2% of sales].” This was the news Sony’s Ibuka Masaru heard when he arrived in the United States in early 1952. After the second symposium, the company published the two-volume Transistor Technology—a compilation of articles by key researchers at Murray Hill and Allentown—to be provided to its patent licensees (Riordan & Hoddeson, 1997, pp. 196–197). By 1952, most major U.S. companies, including GE, Raytheon, Texas Instruments, and Westinghouse, became WE licensees (Transistor Technology Symposium, 1952)." (An updated version of Transistor Technology is available from archive.org, in three volumes, eg, https://archive.org/details/transistor_technology_v1/page/n5/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/transistor_technology_v1/page/n5... ) I can hardly think the WE execs thought all those licensees were going to make hearing aids at best. While I don't have a copy of Chip Wars handy, archive.org has a copy of the 1989 book "The Chip War" by Fred Warshofsky. At https://archive.org/details/chipwarbattlefor00wars/page/62/mode/2up?q=sony https://archive.org/details/chipwarbattlefor00wars/page/62/m... you can read how Ibuka told the WE engineers he wanted "to make the world's smallest radio. He was laughed at." The frequency characteristics were too poor for radio. Sony ended up having to develop the ground-junction transistor to solve that noise problem. I think a fair reading is that WE did not think Sony could do anything with the transistor regarding voice or music beyond a hearing aid as they knew their transistors couldn't handle the bandwidth. We can read that WE needed convincing to provide a license in the first place because "Technology Importation ..." writes: "When he finally got in touch with WE, the U.S. company reacted suspiciously to small, unknown company from the Far East. WE asked Sony to send more detailed information about the firm, including a brief company history, recent financial reports, and a list of technical achievements."

jjeaff 3y ago

quadrillions (a quadrillion is 1,000 trillions) seemed a bit high to me, so I looked it up. it's actually about 2 Billion Trillion a year.

eesmith 3y ago

That account does not appear to be true. From "Technology Importation, Corporate Strategies, and the Rise of the Japanese Semiconductor Industry in the 1950s" at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256067/pdf https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256067/pdf > In March 1952, Ibuka traveled to the United States to investigate its domestic tape-recorder market and to learn from American firms. It was during this trip that Ibuka ran across a WE newsletter announcing that AT&T was openly licensing its transistor patents for a nominal licensing fee of $25,000. Literally overnight, he decided that transistor radios should be Sony’s next major product. ... Iwama and Tsukamoto, along with three other researchers, officially began Sony’s transistor-development project in July 1953, just months before the company signed a patent-licensing agreement with AT&T (Sony Corporation, 1986, p. 325). (If that is not accessible, https://project.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/kikkawa/iss-6.pdf https://project.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/kikkawa/iss-6.pdf says Sony "Concludes transistor license agreement with Western Electric" in October 1953. Western Electric was "the primary equipment manufacturer, supplier, and purchasing agent for the Bell System from 1881 until 1984" says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor points out AT&T "first used transistors in telecommunications equipment in the No. 4A Toll Crossbar Switching System in 1953" and "The first prototype pocket transistor radio was shown ... from August 29 to September 6, 1953." A quick look of publications of the time finds articles like this August 1952 piece from the Illinois Business Review : > The Electronic Department of the General Electric Company reports that a whole new electronics business is growing out of the development of the transistor, said to be a potential successor to the vacuum tube. Transistors are made of germanium, which is recovered as a byproduct in the smelting and refining of zinc ores. Since they contain no heated element they never “burn out” and last indefinitely. The giant digital computers, or magic brains, which now use several thousand vacuum tubes and occupy a large-size room can conceivably become small enough to be applied to everyday business and industrial problems as are comptometers. Most of the telephone, industrial control, and business machine applications can be filled by the transistor; it will become practical to build amplifiers for use on transoceanic telephone cables. The simplicity and ruggedness of the transistor will have a direct effect also on military electronics, especially on airborne equipment. or this October 1952 article on some of the uses of transistors - https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n137/mode/2up?q=transistor https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n137/mo... with the subtitle "look for them soon in pocket radios and TVs almost that small" and the comment " RCA has just announced that it has boosted the frequency of several units high enough for use in FM radios and TV sets." If you don't mind the high noise, the same 1952 issue includes a description of how you can build your own transistor radio, at https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n239/mode/2up?q=transistor https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n239/mo... . Hard to think Western Electric didn't know of any of these possibilities when discussing licensing with Sony.

failbuffer 3y ago
Very thorough, thank you My source was Chris Miller's /Chip War/: "Upon landing in the United States in 1953, Morita was shocked by the country’s vast distances, open spaces, and extraordinary consumer wealth, especially compared to the deprivation of postwar Tokyo. This country seems to have everything, Morita thought. In New York, he met AT&T executives who agreed to issue him a license to produce the transistor. They told him to expect to manufacture nothing more useful than a hearing aid." Certainly many Americans were aware of and were chasing the potential of transistors almost immediately. This is not incompatible with management at the top being slow to grasp same.
- eesmith 3y ago
  The "Technology Importation, Corporate Strategies, and the Rise of the Japanese Semiconductor Industry in the 1950s" link says it was Western Electric ("the manufacturing arm of the Bell System") who did the licensing, so it technically should have been WE executives, yes? That may be a minor point, but you can also read that after Morita signed the patent license, he "returned to Tokyo with a few sample transistors, a piece of high-grade germanium crystal, and a copy of Transistor Technology." What was Transistor Technology? "After the first symposium, WE began to license the patent rights to manufacture transistors to anyone willing to pay a fee of $25,000, which was “to be applied as an advance against any future royalties [usually 2% of sales].” This was the news Sony’s Ibuka Masaru heard when he arrived in the United States in early 1952. After the second symposium, the company published the two-volume Transistor Technology—a compilation of articles by key researchers at Murray Hill and Allentown—to be provided to its patent licensees (Riordan & Hoddeson, 1997, pp. 196–197). By 1952, most major U.S. companies, including GE, Raytheon, Texas Instruments, and Westinghouse, became WE licensees (Transistor Technology Symposium, 1952)." (An updated version of Transistor Technology is available from archive.org, in three volumes, eg, https://archive.org/details/transistor_technology_v1/page/n5/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/transistor_technology_v1/page/n5... ) I can hardly think the WE execs thought all those licensees were going to make hearing aids at best. While I don't have a copy of Chip Wars handy, archive.org has a copy of the 1989 book "The Chip War" by Fred Warshofsky. At https://archive.org/details/chipwarbattlefor00wars/page/62/mode/2up?q=sony https://archive.org/details/chipwarbattlefor00wars/page/62/m... you can read how Ibuka told the WE engineers he wanted "to make the world's smallest radio. He was laughed at." The frequency characteristics were too poor for radio. Sony ended up having to develop the ground-junction transistor to solve that noise problem. I think a fair reading is that WE did not think Sony could do anything with the transistor regarding voice or music beyond a hearing aid as they knew their transistors couldn't handle the bandwidth. We can read that WE needed convincing to provide a license in the first place because "Technology Importation ..." writes: "When he finally got in touch with WE, the U.S. company reacted suspiciously to small, unknown company from the Far East. WE asked Sony to send more detailed information about the firm, including a brief company history, recent financial reports, and a list of technical achievements."