Pacific: The Ocean of the Future. Simon Winchester
sets found their way to the United States, it was more by luck than adroit corporate judgment.
Whether the American makers of the Regency TR-1 ever saw an example of the Sony radio remains unknown. But something frightened them or their backers. For, suddenly, the firm announced that it would stop manufacturing the sets and would withdraw from the marketplace. It was a decision (still quite inexplicable, even at this remove) that left a gaping hole in the radio marketplace, and one that the newly named Sony Corporation4 was poised, and happy, to exploit.
The device that Sony then made in an effort to fill this gap was designated the TR-63, the so-called pocketable radio. Company lore has it that Sony created the word pocketable, but the word made its first recorded appearance in the English language as far back as 1699. The same internal histories suggest also that this radio wasn’t exactly as pocketable as the brochures had it. It certainly didn’t fit into the breast pockets of most Japanese shirts. The wily Mr. Morita, it is said, had his salesmen’s shirts modified with a slightly bigger pocket, so their demonstrations of pocketability could invariably progress without mishap.
Such claims may well have been buffed by time and expensive PR firms, and perhaps understandably so. The event that truly made this elegant little radio famous, and that made Sony a familiar name into the bargain, was entirely true, and involved a robbery.
The tale appeared on page 17 of the New York Times of Friday, January 17, 1958. Most of the other news items close by were quite routine. Noël Coward had a cold, and so could not go on for his matinee performance of Nude with Violin. Winston Churchill’s actress-daughter Sarah, who had already been fined fifty dollars for disorderly conduct in Malibu, was now in the hospital suffering from exhaustion and emotional upset. A twenty-five-year-old prostitute named Sally Mae Quinn had squeezed her evidently rather slender self through an eight-inch window to become the first person ever to break out of a prison for women in Greenwich Village—though the trail of blood on the roadway thirty-five feet below the window suggested to police she might have something of a limp.
But the lead story on page 17 was of somewhat greater moment: “4,000 Tiny Radios Stolen in Queens,” read the headline. The story was a sensation. A manager named Vincent Ciliberti, turning up for his morning shift at Delmonico International, an import-export company based across from the Sunnyside rail freight station in Long Island City, had discovered to his alarmed dismay that, during the night, a posse of thieves had broken in through a second-floor window and taken “400 cartons of green, red, black and lemon-colored radios.”
The men had then, apparently displaying great fortitude and eagerness, broken no fewer than four locks to get into a freight elevator, backed a truck up to a loading bay, moved the radios in their boxes onto a pair of skids, and then hauled them onto the back of the truck, and vanished into the darkness.
Each carton held ten of these tiny radios, which Delmonico had been holding before sending them off to the stores to sell at $40 apiece. Some $160,000 worth of high-tech merchandise had just disappeared into the wilderness of outer New York City. It was the lead story on the city’s radio stations throughout the day. Detectives were investigating what was said to be the biggest heist of electronics equipment in American history. More than fifty potential witnesses were questioned at length. No one, of course, had seen a thing.
Then, confirming the adage about ill winds and the doing of good, came a crucial piece of information. Delmonico, reported the Times, “is the sole importer and distributor of Sony Radio, built in Japan. Each of the $40 radios is 1¼ inches thick, 2¾ inches wide and 4½ inches high.” A search suggests that this was the first time the name Sony had ever appeared in the New York Times.
Most crucially of all—and most delightfully, so far as Tokyo was concerned—it was only these Sony-brand radios that had been taken. Left behind, unclaimed and disdained, were twenty cases of other radios, and several tons of other electronics equipment. Since only the Sony devices were taken, it suggested to most readers of the paper that Sony radios were the highest-value items, the only radios worth stealing. If the thieves thought they were good and valuable, then they probably were.
That truly set the market afire. The little radio promptly became an essential. To this day, most Americans of a certain age remember their first transistor radio: a small plastic box, with a tinny loudspeaker and perhaps an earphone, that could be smuggled into high school, perhaps so that a baseball game could be listened to during algebra; or taken in the Impala at night to provide soft music while one was parked on a clifftop, hoping for rather more than the view.
All of a sudden an entire new industry swept into being, an industry bent on employing electronics, and devices with electronics at their heart, for the sole purpose of entertaining, amusing, and informing the public—either en masse or, more often, in person. Other manufacturers might continue to satisfy other, more traditional demands of heating, lighting, clothing, feeding, and moving the public about. Others might build cars or ships, mine coal, make stoves or washing machines or razor blades. But this new industry skillfully blended technology with the humanities, married the machine to the artist; and by doing so, its leaders were seeking to improve the daily lives of the average person by amusing and interesting him, by playing on his emotions and to his sentiments. It did so by the employment of transistors, semiconductors, and printed circuit boards.
The term consumer electronics was instantly coined5 to describe this new business—backed by an industry that was born on the Pacific Rim, and has in one form or another come to play a sustaining central role in the betterment of human life, in most corners of the world.
And Sony, in Tokyo, one of the first entrants into the business that it had invented, promptly did its best to satisfy the market it had created. Factories expanded and hummed with energy, and hired thousands; and more plants were built, some hastily, most in more considered fashion, and with both investors and company bosses now cleaving to a firm belief in the firm’s ever-more-settled future. Smokestacks belched, machines roared, heavily laden trucks lumbered off to the airport—entire cargo planes had to be chartered from the newly formed Japan Air Lines to meet Christmas demand—and containers, containers, containers were packed with boxes, bound in those early days for Seattle, Long Beach, and San Francisco Bay, and later for just about every major maritime port.
The containers were eventually to be crammed with much more than cartons of simple radio sets. The inventions that would be dreamed up by Masaru Ibuka and his swiftly expanding teams of engineers included microphones and videocassettes, computers and video cameras, games and storage devices, and a thousand other essentially inessential gadgets for the improvement of the daily lot of lots of people. The Walkman—a tape player that didn’t record, seen initially as a heresy for a company that had made its name by recording sounds and not simply playing them—was a worldwide success.6 The Trinitron—which Ibuka said later was the creation of which he was most proud—made full-color high-quality television inexpensively available to all.
A change in perception also started to occur as this steady stream of new products began to emerge from the Sony engineering benches. In the immediate postwar years, Asian countries were seen largely as peddlers of the shoddy, the gimcrack, and the second-rate. But now, with the inventions being shipped eastward by Sony and its like, Japan was swiftly winning quite another reputation, a name for itself such as it had never enjoyed before: for being a past master of the precise, the particular, and the highly accurate. All these devices, at least in the firm’s early days (and this applies to the products of most of the other Japanese firms as well), were made with the kind of precision that was more readily associated with products made in Europe, especially in Switzerland and Germany.
Japan was a society built on traditions born largely of nature: of working in bamboo and water; of tatami and silk; of ceramics and flower arranging and the presentation of tea and the hammering of razor-sharp sweeps of steel; of adapting a natural world that, ipso facto, existed utterly without mathematical perfection, without straight lines. Now, all of a sudden, and thanks to men such as Ibuka, Morita, and Iwama, this country was becoming known for its masters of precision, for its ability