The Sony Story: Part One

at least three. Uh. I'm trying desperately to keep it fairly tight because I know you guys don't want to have this turn into the Sony Stuff Show, but I want to be able to cover a lot of the important moments in the history of this company. It is a very interesting story, largely because of several factors. One is that it's a Japanese company that came into being after World War Two, so that was a very obviously

a very tumultuous time in Japan. And too, it ended up being a huge influence in technology in multiple ways. Three They introduced not just brand new types of technology to the rest of the consumer world, but they also ended up incorporating other people's ideas into their technology in ways that was innovative, and of course for they, they are a company that is enormous and has an umbrella across multiple industries at this point, not just electronics but

entertainment as well. So we're gonna look at that. And Uh, I won't go into full detail on all the different subsidiaries of Sony because to do that would make this turn into truly epic series. But I'm gonna focus primarily on the main company, and I will mention when the company ended up making acquisitions or uh spinning off companies that ended up being big players. But those entities will get a full treatment in a future episode somewhere down

the line. So let's get started, shall we. So when did it all begin? Okay, so that depends upon what branch of Sony you're looking at, because some of the subsidiaries actually pre date the company itself, because the company would end up making acquisitions of other companies and those other companies were older than Sony was. But let's concentrate

on just the core company of Sony. Uh. One thing I can say right now, Sony was instrumental in getting consumer electronics to where it is now, there's no doubt about it on and it all really starts if you go back to April eleven. Now, that's when a man named Masaru Ibuka was born in Nico City, Japan. As a young man, he became interested in engineering and invention, and he even earned the nickname Genius inventor at Waseda University, where he was part of the School of Science and Engineering.

He graduated in nineteen thirty three and he got a job at the photochemical Laboratory which processed movie film. So that's where he went after he uh, he graduated. Then you've got another very important player who was born on January twenty se that's Akio Morita, and he was born in Nagoya, Japan. His family expected him to carry on the family business, and that family business for many many

generations was the brewing of sake and soy sauce. But he wasn't so interested in sake and soysas so he wanted to look into science and engineering and he would go on to attend Osaka Imperial University and he got a degree in physics. But then we have a very important event that happened that changed everything, and that of course, is World War Two. Now, during the war, Marita would end up joining the Japanese Navy and eventually achieved the rank of lieutenant. He met Ibuka, who was working as

an electrical engineer. And now remember Abuca is the older of the two, and so Ibuka was working as an electrical engineer. Marita was a lieutenant in the navy, and together they began to work on developing some wartime technologies, including heat seeking, missile tech and night vision scopes. When the war ended in nineteen forty five, they would end up going their separate ways and for a while they lost touch. Now nine post war Japan was a very

different place from pre war Japan. The country was trying to rebuild. It was really in shambles. At that point, Ibuka opened up a radio repair shop in a building that was not entirely ructurally sound. It was somewhat bombed out. It was called the shiro Kira Department Store in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. So remember that radios in this era used vacuum tubes. They didn't use transistors, so radio sets were enormous. They were big, clunky things. Uh, your typical home radio was

a piece of furniture. It wasn't something that you would move around. You would set it up, you know, in some part of the home, and that's pretty much where it lived. Because it was it tended to be big and heavy, and because it has vacuum tubes in it somewhat delicate as well, you obviously didn't want to knock it over or anything. Now, I Buca's workshop was on the third floor of this department store building, and it was in a narrow room that also had a telephone

switchboard inside it. He had a small staff working for him, and he was paying them mostly out of his own savings. Uh. And apparently the story goes that the staff was known to work very long hours, stretching well into the night, and that they would sometimes get locked into the department store because everyone else would be leaving and they would lock up and the folks over in a Buca's shop

would be stuck. Uh. It would force employees to have to try and leave through fire exits, and according to one history I read, several employees never narrowly avoided getting arrested by police because the police were convinced these were actually thieves who had broken into the department store to steal stuff. So that's what's going on in a Bucca's world. There was a big demand for radio's, particularly shortwave radios.

During the war, the Japanese government had banned short wave radios, mostly in an effort to prevent Japanese citizens from hearing Allied propaganda. So the shortwave radio business was now starting to pick up again because the war is over and now that band had been lifted, So there was a demand.

There was, you know, business there. I Meanwhile, Akio Morita uh was planning on taking a teaching position at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, but then he read an article about Ubuka's radio repair shop, and he decided to contact his old wartime buddy and see if he could possibly end up working with Ibuka. In nineteen forty six, on May seven, Ibuka and Marita would form a partnership and create the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation, also known as Tatsuko.

They name uh taman Meda, Ibuka's father in law, as the president of the company, and they had a startup capital of one d ninety thousand yen. Typically at this point, I would tell you how much that costs in US dollars today. But it turns out this is really really super tricky to do because you have to factor in conversion rates between different currencies and inflation rates, and it's not like inflation is the same in Japan as it

is in the United States. So they ended up getting too complicated for me to do, sadly, but I did read at least one source that said that the amount that two borrowed was around five U S dollars to launch the company back in ninet. Their goal was to develop, manufacture, and sell products that were of a higher quality than what was coming out of Japan's manufacturing centers at the time.

So post War Japan, there were other companies that are making electronics, but they were largely known as creating things that were knockoffs of products that were coming from other countries as well and then being sold for less money, so essentially the cheap versions of stuff that you would find elsewhere, and they didn't want to do that. They wanted to create high quality products, like first run type stuff, not knockoffs. But that's pretty tough to do. It's not

something that you just jump into. Um Ibuca actually drew up a prospectus to guide the company kind of like their their mission statement and their guiding principles, and it included passages like this one. We must avoid problems which befall large corporations while we create and introduce technologies which large corporations cannot match. The reconstruction of Japan depends upon

the development of dynamic technologies. So this is you know, I mean it sounds a little grandiose, but this was really an effort to to take Japan out of the ashes of World War two and have it take its place as a leading economic power in the in the world and to make a real contribution to innovation in technology. Uh, there's a big, big order, you know, especially coming from a place where a lot of people were writing off Japan as being it will always just be like a

place that that cheap stuff comes out of. Now, Abuca's job was to develop products. Essentially, he was the engineer, and Akio Morita's job was to handle personnel, financing and mark itting. They launched their first product. Actually technically this came out before Marita even joined on. There was a product that that Ibuco was working on, an electric rice cooker. Uh. This was a pretty funny thing. I mean, it was

essentially a wooden tub. If you look at a picture, it looks kind of like a wooden tub or a wooden bucket with some metal uh plates on the inside of it. Not completely coding it, just like think of bands of aluminum that are bolted down and wired uh to this wooden tub. The aluminum were actually electrodes. They were screwed into the bottom of the tub, not really bolted.

And Japan actually had a surplus of electricity at this point because during World War two the country had built more power plants in an effort to power the war. Uh effort and effort to power the war effort. I apologize for the redundancy, but they bought they built a lot more our plants in order to create more capacity. But then after the war, the country was essentially disarmed and they didn't really have the demand that these power plants could meet, Like they had more more supply than

they had to band. So Abukas thought was, how about we create more stuff that uses power. Because we've got the power, that's not a problem. We've got the capacity. Why not create stuff that allows people to take advantage of that. And so they started really looking at doing these electrical appliances like this rice cooker. But there was a tight, teeny tiny problem, and that was that the

rice cooker did not work very well at all. For one thing, not all rice is the same, you can't you know, just one type of rice does not necessarily cook at the same rate as a different type of rice. So the results depended on the amount of water that you had, the type of rice you put in the tub, and odds were really really good that what you would get at the end of it would come out undercooked or overcooked. So the product was ultimately a failure, but

it taught them a lot while they were developing it. Now, one thing that wasn't a failure was that Marita and Abuca were able to bring on shows a Buro Tachikawa to handle the general affairs of the company. Also, I should just go ahead and say I'm doing my best to pronounce these names correctly, but I do apologize because I know I'm going to butcher some of them, but I will again, it is not through lack of care. It is only because I am not very good at

pronouncing Japanese names. So what were Tachikawa's duties. Well, for one, he purchased rice on the black market, so they were selling a product, this this electric rice cooker that depended upon um having access to rice. But the issue was that food rationing was in place for several years after World War two in Japan, so Tachikawa would actually buy rice on the black market in order to market it

along with the rice cooker. Japan's economy was still in turmoil at after World War two, actually for several years after World War two, and so the company was focusing on marketing products to an overseas market, not just the domestic market. They saw the need to cater to both.

They knew that they were going to sell products in Japan, but they also knew that that was not going to be enough to elevate this new company, especially since there were a lot of established companies like Toshiba was already a company at this point and was a company before

World War two. So Sony, because it started so late, or Totsuko, i should say, at this point, because they had not adopted the name Sony, they knew they were going to have to market their stuff to to an audience beyond just Japan if they wanted to have success, so they started looking at having an overseas UH presence,

at least a market, not a physical presence. At this point, other Japanese companies were already doing this, but they were again largely selling those cheaper products, and Marita and Abuca

wanted to go beyond that. But that wasn't easy because the company, Tatsuko didn't have any real machinery to speak of and not enough capital to purchase equipment, so instead, the employees ended up salvaging stuff from rubble leftover from the war, and they would use it in place of normal tools, like there were stories about using springs that

they found as screwdrivers, so it's kind of crazy. They also used telephone cables rather than electrical wires for some of their prototypes, which created extra challenges engineering challenges, but they did that because there were down to telephone wires that they could salvage, and then since they were just creating prototypes, not indo products, they figured, well, we might as well just use this and wait until we've developed a good product before we switch over to actual electrical wiring.

Another big challenge actually came from the Japanese government itself, multiple challenges actually, because at this time, the Japanese government, which they still had an emperor and impress at this time. Uh, the Japanese government took a very hands on approach to Japanese businesses and their operation. Uh. There was a Ministry of Finance and there were other ministries as well that all the businesses had to work with and obey, and it made it really complicated, especially if you wanted to

have products sold overseas, and made it challenging. But even more than that, the Japanese government had also decided to make a switch from one end currency to a new yen currency. But that required all businesses to start to earn new yen currency in order to stay solvent. You couldn't just collect old yen notes. They wouldn't be good for much longer. So uh, it kind of kind of put a ticking time bomb on companies. They had to make sure that they were selling enough products in that

time to gather enough new currency to remain afloat. So that was something that most companies don't have to worry about, and it's a little unique to this particular situation. One of the products that did earn the company some money was an electrically heated cushion. Now, that cushion was a very simple design. It was a mesh wire grid sandwich between sheets of paper inside a leather cushion with some padding.

So if you know your electronics, you know if you pass current through an electrical wire, some of that energy get is lost due to giving off of heat its resistance. Right, the greater the resistance the wire, the more that electricity is converted into heat. This is the basis for things like electrical heaters, where you have a coil that is really just a resistor that's coiled around and around and

around and around. You run electric through the coil and the coil heats up as a result, and that's where you generate electric heat. Well, that was the same basic premise of the cushion, except instead of being a coil, it's a grid. But this particular product was maybe a little too simple because it didn't have a thermostat or any way of controlling the temperature whatsoever, which meant that

the cushion could and did overheat. Also, the voltage from Japan's power plants wasn't steady, so at night you could end up having power surges, and sometimes the cushions would short out and scorch things like people's pants, or their beds, or their grandmother's or you know, et cetera. Now, Ibuka had said that it was not a good idea for his brand new company that he was trying to get off the ground to be associated with a substandard cushion,

So he did the reasonable thing. He marketed the cushion under a fictional company name called the Ginza Heating Company. You know, instead of not putting out a defective product, just put a fake company name on the defective product and your home free. That's brilliant, but BALTI are not. The cushion actually sold well enough to keep the company kind of afloat. Meanwhile, when under their actual Totsuko name, the real company name, the company began to sell record pickups. Now,

a record pickup is also known as a needle. It's what you would have on a on a turntable for vinyl albums. And I'm sure many of you are familiar with this, but just in case you aren't, If you folks out there who have never really messed with a a record player vinyl turntable type deal, what you have is you've got an arm and on the end of

that arm is a needle. The needle actually fits within grooves inside the vinyl record, and it vibrates according to changes in that groove, and there's a transducer that the needle is attached to, and the transducer job is to take this kinetic energy, this vibration translated into electricity, send that signal to an amp, which increases the power of the signal, and then goes on to speakers which then can play this signal, and then we get to listen

to music or talk or whatever is on the vinyl album. So UH Tatsuko began to market these record pickups and those also record players were not legal during the war, and the reason for them was nothing to do with propaganda. It had to do with the fact that the components that you would use to make record players UH could be used for other things that the military could take

advantage of. UH. You know, resources were scarce, so you could not use them for frivolous purposes like creating record players. But now in the post war era, everything was changing. Towards the end of nineteen Totsuko had to move from the department store they had been in to a small factory uh. It was only temporary, however, as the factory owner decided that they needed to leave, he actually ordered Tatsuko to vacate the factory area that they he had

set aside for them uh. And one of the reasons that might have played a part in this is that there was some electricity ration ing going on at the time, and it was possible that the factory owner was worried that this company, which was known for having employees who would work long into the night, might end up using up his electricity ration and he wouldn't have or he'd had to pay extra in order to conduct his own business.

So they got the boot um and Ibuca and Marita were searching for a new facility, one that would be large enough to have everyone in the company working in the same location at the same time, because they were kind of spread out among three different locations at this

point and it made collaborating very difficult. Uh. And then they were able to finally create that, although it didn't last for very long in the sense that the company kept growing and they would end up building news sites, so you didn't have everybody under the same roof for very long. You they grew too big for that. Meanwhile, Japan's n h K, which was there that or is the National Broadcast Station, hired on Tutsuko to convert wire

military wireless equipment into receivers for broadcasting. Uh So, in other words, the idea was that, well, we've got all these military radio installations that we could convert over to broadcast installations, but we need some help. Um that work was really steady, so Tutsuko began to make a profit. They weren't just staying afloat, they were actually doing well

in the company would relocate to Shinagawa, Tokyo. They took over warehouse space that had belonged to the Nipon Corburetor company, and the Sony Corporation is still at that location today, or at least they have a location there today. Uh In the period between nineteen and nineteen fifty, Abuca wanted to make a successful consumer electronics product and not just a radio, so he started by looking into the possibility

of producing wire recorders. Now, a wire recorder is sort of like a tape recorder, but while tape stores information magnetically onto plastic film that has a you know, ferromagnetic material on it, like a powder essentially that's been bonded to the plastic film. Wire recorders use magnetic steel wire to store info, so you're still storing the information magnetically, but instead of it being on tape, it's on an

actual physical wire. The company actually reverse engineered military wire recorders and began to experiment with them, but then it Juca and Marita got a demonstration of a tape recorder from occupation forces at the NHK headquarters, so they were able to they had not seen this in person before.

But then they saw a tape recorder, which had already been invented obviously, but they had not had experience with it, and they were so impressed by the quality of the tape recorder, which seemed so much better than the wire recorders of the day, they decided their company should produce the first Japanese tape recorder, and they abandoned the idea of the wire recorder entirely. Their first experiments with tape recorders involved using rice paste to add here magnetic dust

to paper strips. Now the prototype didn't work because the magnetic dust they used was actually too strong for the tape head to write to. So in other words, they created a tape that had very um electro magnetic magnetic doest well really just magnetic dost, not electro magnetic dust. But they had magnetic dust that was so strong that you couldn't you couldn't use a tape head to right new information to it. You would just get this loud

noise because the magnetic properties were too strong. So they started looking around for an alternative to the dust that they had been using, and they decided that they should use ferric oxide. But there was a problem. They didn't have a supply of ferric oxide. So they did the next best thing. They bought a couple of bottles of ox oxalic ferrite and then they processed it to create

ferric oxide. And by processing, I mean they poured the oxalic ferrite into a frying pan and they heated the frying pan on a stovetop until it converted into ferric oxide oxalic farright. By the way, it's kind of like a yellowish powder, So essentially they were uh cooking this until it turned sort of a brownish black. They actually had one person who was particularly good at spotting changes in color, and it was his job to monitor the stuff to make sure that they took it off the

heat once it reached a certain level of processing. Now it took more time for the engineers to find a way to produce powder fine enough to be useful and then find a way to adhere it to the actual tape. They even consulted with a cosmetics company that was known for making a face powder for women and tried to see if they had any hints as to create a

powder fine enough for the purposes of creating tape. But when the cosmetics company heard how fine a powder they needed, they said, we would never make that because it's so fine that it would just blow right off of a lady's cheek. It wouldn't do any good, so we can't help you. It took them a lot of trial, trial and error experiments, but they were able to produce a

tape that could record and reproduce sound. So by the company had created a prototype, and the following year nine fifty they had early models of what would become their actual consumer tape recorder, the first in Japan and one of the earliest for consumers. That prototype they had was not so great. I mean, it could record and it could replay sound, but if the quality wasn't really there, which is why they had to continue developing. So n SoC creates the sawny tape recording medium s o in

I dash tape. They also launched the G type tape recorder, which they intended for institutional use, like it was going to be used in medical facilities and educational facilities that sort of stuff. It was not the G type was

not being marketed to home consumers. Instead, they developed a second type of recorder called the H type recorder that was for home use, and the press for the products said that they would be useful for talking paper and talking magazines and that they might one day replace the phonograph, which turned out to be true, but it was one of those times where the the pr was kind of making some grandiose promises. It just so happens that it

did work out that way. Eventually took some time, though, and and of course the type of tape that they were using at that time was very different than the plastic film tape that would be used later on. During the era where cassettes became huge, uh figuratively speaking, literally, they were actually fairly small. In nineteen fifty, news of how Bell Labs employees had pioneered the transistor had made

it to Japan. So the transistor does the same job as vacuum tubes, but is a much smaller form factor and it's a solid state type of electronic as opposed to the vacuum tube approach. And Abuca and Marita had heard of it, and initially they were kind of skeptical that transistor would ever be practical, that you would ever use it in anything beyond like some experimental prototype type stuff. But in nineteen fifty two, Ibuka would actually make a

trip to the United States. It was his first trip there. Started off a bit rough. Ibuka was not fluent in English, and he had some challenges getting to New York. He actually flew into Anchorage, Alaska first, and he experienced some things that were shocking to him, including some xenophobia, uh some sphere of foreigners in the United States that he

wasn't anticipating when he got there. Um. But he made his way to New York and then he was informed that Western Electric, the parent company of Bell Labs, would be happy to license the transistor technology to companies willing to pay royalties. So, in other words, instead of having this technology and keeping it proprietary. Uh Western Electric was saying, no, no,

anyone can use this technology. You just have to pay us a licensing fee and then you'll be allowed to uh TO to manufacture transistors and and you can completely you can totally use the methodologies that we're talking about. You have to develop your own manufacturing system. You know, you don't get to use our our factories or anything, but you can use the technology without fear of being sued, which is that's the way patents are supposed to work.

Uh Abuka realized that the transistor could serve as an engineering challenge for his team and in a sense keep up their morale, which is kind of funny, like he looked at the transistor and thought, well, it may not ever work for consumer technology, but if I give my team the challenge of take this type of technology and develop it so that we can put it into a radio in a couple of years and sell that to consumers, it would be the type of challenge that would occupy

his team, keep them busy, keep their minds active, keep their morale up. Because his worry was that the tape recorder business had become defined. They knew what they were doing they were no longer innovating in that space. They were producing in that space, and he was worried that just producing would not keep his team happy because they were creative individuals and he needed to make sure that they were doing something that they found fulfilling, which apparently

involves giving them really tough engine herring challenges. It's kind of an interesting approach. Now, this was all easier said than done because of economic and political issues. You know I mentioned earlier. In Japan, you have these ministries that end up being involved in corporate business, and that is an impediment. Also, there were several large companies in Japan

that had already started to work on the transistor. They were paying our CIA for technical expertise to guide them in that and the Ministry of Trade and Industry representatives were skeptical that Tatsuko, which was a very small company compared to these larger ones in Japan, would ever be able to make a significant contribution using the transistor. And since the Ministry of Trade and Industry would issue licenses for manufacturing transistors, this was a problem. If they don't

have confidence in the company, they won't grant the license. Now, Marita would later visit the U s Ibuca had already visited, now Marita's visiting and Uh and he visited Western Electric and eventually the company received permission from the Ministry of Trade and Industry to manufacture transistors, although they almost didn't because when their representatives found out that Tatsuko executives had met with Americans to talk about licensing the patent without

first getting permission from the Japanese government, they had a little bit of a fit and it was almost the case that they would forbid Tatsuko from going forward with this.

But fortunately for Tatsuko, that department was reorganized in nineteen fifty three, so once that reorg happened, things became a little more favorable towards Trtsuko and other Japanese companies trying to work with foreign companies, and so a Buca decided that the first application of the transistor technology should be a transistor radio, and the company started to work on that idea. In nineteen fifty four, a United States company

called Regency would market the first commercial transistor radio. This actually came as a blow to Abuka, who really wanted his company to create the first commercial transistor radio, and they would do so, but they would do it the next year in nineteen UH. They first were going to launch a radio earlier than that, but it turned out

that their design had a major flaw. UH. They had a plastic grill on the front of these radios, and it turned out that when the temperatures would get warm enough, the grill would just peel away from the radio, so that launch was completely botched. They had to scrap it. UH. This would actually become an issue multiple times throughout the history of Sony, where in those early days, UH, they would develop a type of technology in one time, one part of the year, and it would work fine because

they were designing it in that time of year. They would get it to the performance that they wanted, and then the seasons would change and the temperature would either increase or decrease, you know, you go into summer or you go into winter or whatever, and then they would find out that the product they had designed no longer worked the way they intended it to because the temperatures were too different. So it took a while before they had found an approach where they could develop technology at

different temperatures and make sure it's still worked properly. That's one of those things about especially about early electronics, but really anytime, the more precise you get, the narrower your parameters are, and you have to start really working with a lot of engineering challenges to make sure that the thing that you're creating actually works the way you wanted to in all reasonable conditions. Uh. One thing that Tatsuko really prided itself on was that their transistor radio included

transistors that the company itself had made. Tatsuko had made the transistors found in the transistor radio that they marketed, whereas Regency, the first company to bring transistor radios to market, we're actually purchasing their transistors from Texas Instruments. They weren't making the transistors themselves, they were buying it from another company and then using it in their products. So that

was one source of pride for the BUCA. His company was actually making both the transistors and the radio, which in him his mind, meant it was superior. In Abuka realized that Americans had trouble pronouncing Totsuko or Tokyo sushin Kogyo, which was the full name, and so he met with his team and started to say discuss alternate names for

the company, or at least for a brand. At that time, they wanted to be able to market their products under a brand name that people would be able to say, and not just in the United States but all around the world. So they tried to find a word that would be easy to pronounce in any dialect. And the word that they created really was sony. And according to pretty much every record I can find, Sony got its

inspiration from two things. One was the Latin words sonas, from which the words sound and sonic originate, and the other was the name Sonny, for the nickname Sonny, which you would tend to get of a young person who has a lot of pluck, specifically young boys at the time, because I mean, this is the nineteen fifties, um, and there was just that kind of a philosophy, I guess is the way word all used to be kind. So, yeah, sonny and sonas were the the inspiration, and so they

came up with the name Sony for the brand name. Now, the company still stayed as Tatsuko for the time being, but the brand they would use on their products was Sony. Around that same time, Tatsuko also began to manufacture transistors for other Japanese companies, and this was a big deal because again Tatsuka was a much smaller company than some of these other ones, so it almost seemed like it was boastful for a little company to make transistors for

other Japanese companies. They also needed to expand their operations in order to meet demand, and that meant hiring on more employees. So what was their strategy. How would they get more people to help create transistors. Well, their strategy was to hire what they started to call transistor girls. Now, these were young ladies who were seeking employment to help

their families. Many of them were opting to go into the workforce rather than attend senior high school, so they would go to high school, but instead of going to senior high school, they would essentially drop out of school and then go into the workforce to help their families out. And they mainly came from outlying areas in Japan, more rural areas in Japan. So Tatsuko ended up purchasing and renovating a building not far from the factory for the

young ladies to live in. It was a dormitory, and this is something that was not uncommon in Japan at the time. To build dormitories for employees. Uh So, it almost sounds like a lot of these companies had almost a collegiate atmosphere. You had your workplace and then you had your dormitory and you just pretty much stayed there. Um in the history about the company, there's actually an

amusing story about this first dormitory. One of the executives from Sony was put in charge of escorting the ladies to their new dorm but got the message that the dorm wasn't quite ready yet, so he needed to stall for time. So instead he got all the ladies onto a bus and they took a bus tour of Tokyo. And apparently the young ladies thought the tour was really exciting. Most of them came from areas well outside of Tokyo, so to them the city was just exciting and interesting.

But the executive the entire time was apparently freaking out that there was not going to be any place where the stay once the tour was overly it all worked out. Employment at that time in Japan was a regulated process, and again we're getting into this idea of the government really being hands on with the way companies behave. Typically companies in Tokyo could not hire on people all by themselves. They couldn't do it just go out there and put

out a notice and hire people and interview them. Instead, all potential hires and all requests had to go through a governmental ministry. But because Tatsuko recruited from areas outside Tokyo, the company could take on more of this responsibility. Now that wasn't because these outlying areas had a different law to cover it. They were still under the same law. But the issue was that in those rural regions. Rather in those rural regions, they just lacked the resources to

to follow the official procedure. You didn't have necessarily representatives of the government out in all of these outlying regions, so there literally was no way to follow the rules if you were recruiting from out there. And that was a little convenient. And by the way, Tatsuka was not like the only company to do this, and they weren't trying to be sneaky or anything. They just they had a real need for it to hire more people, and uh going through the official government chain would have slowed

things down considerably. In nineteen fifty seven, Totsuka would introduce the t R sixty three, a k a. The pocketable radio. Now, the word pocketable didn't exist before n It was coined by Toutsuko upon the launch of the product. And here's some interesting trivia. Fifty of the t R sixty three radios were being sold as the first off the line, So you could get the first ever TR sixty three radio. But don't worry if you didn't buy it, you had forty nine more chances to buy the first one. It's

kind of like something being very unique. You can't be very unique. You're either unique or you're not. You're either the first or you aren't the first. But in in Tatsuko's history there were fifty one of the t R sixty three. The export price of the t R sixty three was thirty nine dollars and nine cents, which, if you adjusted for inflation according to the calculator I used from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that would be about three hundred forty two dollars, So a three forty two

dollar pocket radio pretty expensive, I would say. In night, Tutsuko would officially change its name to the Sony Corporation. Now that was not a change that everybody was crazy about the company's bank took exception to this move, and so did some of the employees of Tatsuko, But ultimately the top brass decided the name change was necessar Serry to take a top spot in the global electronics market, they had to have a name that people could recognize

and say easily. Moreover, they felt like calling the company Sony Corporation would provide for flexibility if the company ever decided to branch out beyond electronics, the name wouldn't cause brand confusion the way something like Sony Electronic Industries might, which turned out to be a really smart decision because, as we know today, Sony is in a lot more

businesses than just the electronics world. They have a presence in lots of different places, So it ended up being a smart move to go with Sony Corporation rather than something more specific like Sony Electronics Industries. Now that brings me to the end of this particular episode of episode one.

I've got so much more to say, but I wanted to get at least to the point where Tatsuko changed its name to Sony um And remember we're at nineteen fifty eight at that point, and the company launched in nineteen six, So it's just been a little bit more than a decade and that's all we've been able to cover. And I haven't really even gotten into a lot of

their big products yet. So in our next episode, we're gonna look at some of the products that got Sony recognition around the world, as well as the philosophy and some of the weird stories around it, uh and how Sony really kind of began to shape itself over the next part of its history. So make sure you tune in next week to hear part two. And um, I don't know when I'll have a good idea of how

many parts this is going to be. I'm aiming for three parts, but based upon how much I've done with the first two parts, it may be a four parter simply because there's just so much to cover. Even if I skip over major product launches, you know, I just concentrate on the first of that particular type of product, it's still a ton of material, like here's the first oh LED television and here's the first three D television. After a while, that list gets super long because Sony

has just developed so many different products. But I will do my best to get through as much of it as I can without making again, without making this the Sony Stuff Show, because I know you guys. You know you're very patient, and uh I appreciate that, but I

don't want to concentrate on one topic forever. If you guys have suggestions for topics I should cover in the future, maybe there's something that you've always wanted to know about in the tech space that I haven't covered, or maybe there's something that I have covered in the past but I really should do an update to it. Let me know. Send me a message. My email is text stuff at how stuff Works dot com, or you can contact me

on Twitter or Facebook. It's tech Stuff hs W at both of those and uh I will talk to you again really see for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff Works dot com m