History of Sony

History

In the beginning there was Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation) but to date it is known as Sony worldwide.

1945

   Sony was originated in the late of 1945 just after the Second World War with a man called Masaru Ibuka who ran a radio repair shop in a half broken department store owned by Shirokiya (Japan’s largest retailer during early 20^th century) which was in Nihonbashi of Tokyo. It started by repairing broken radios and manufacturing small numbers of voltmeters.

1946

   As it came to May 7^th 1946, Ibuka was joined by his colleague Akio Morita and Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha was founded, the company started by building an automatic rice cooker

1950s

   When it reached the 1950s Ibuka travelled to the United States and learnt of Bell Laboratories working on a transistor invention. He then persuaded Bell Labs and acquired the technologies licence to his Japanese company. While the United States was using the technology for other purposes, Ibuka and Morita wanted to use it with communications. American companies like Regency Electronics and Texas Instruments made the first transistor radio as a joint project, but it was actually Ibuka’s company that made transistor radio successful in the commercial business.

    The first commercial transistor radio: the Sony TR-55 was released in 1955, although December of the same year they also released the Sony TR-72. This product favoured within Japan and other markets around the world like Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and Germany. Having six transistors, push/pull output and enhanced sound quality, the TR-72 carried on to be quite popular and was a bestseller through to the early 1960s.

TR-55

   May 1956, the company released a new design called the TR-6, that was slimmer and the sound quality was capable to matching portable tube radios.

   Because of this piece of equipment Sony contracted Atchan, the cartoon character created by Fuyuhiko Okabe, which then became the companies advertisement character. The character finalised to then be known as Sony Boy, the cartoon advert to be shown with TR-6 being held to the characters ear. The character went on through to the mid sixties to represent the company with lots of other products.

TR-6

Finally in January 1958, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. changed its name to Sony Corporation. It was very unusual for any of Japan’s companies to use Roman letters to spell its name but for Sony there was a lot of thought behind the matter. Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K.’s principal bank at the time had strong feelings about the name because they didn’t want the companies name to be tied to any particular industry.

   

The Sony brand - which is a conflation of Sonus, the Latin word for sound and Sonny (as in ‘young boy’) - first appeared in 1955. Totsuko became Sony Corporation three years later.

WORLD OF TECH NEWS

By Rob Mead

April 24th 2008