![]() ![]() Amateurs used transistors to design experimental radio circuits as early as 1950 and Western Electric engineers made a wrist radio in 1952 with 4 transistors as a gift for Dick Tracy creator Chester Gould (Schiffer page 174). Raytheon was first to mass-produce transistors in 1952 and the first to produce a commercial product with transistors, the hearing aid. Until it was perfected, the invention was kept secret for 7 months and no patents were filed until 1948 the first public announcement was J(Braun and Macdonald, p. However, production problems delayed its practical use. 23, 1947, by William Shockley and his team. The germanium transistor was first demonstrated privately at Bell Labs Dec. In Germany, Robert Denk may have produced a transistor radio in February of 1948. The Regency may have been the first commercial transistor radio but Paul Davis has described his development of the first working transistor radio at Texas Instruments in May 1954 (see the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 1993, pages 56-80). Michael Schiffer in The Portable Radio in American Life, (Tucson, 1991) wrote that this was "the world's first shirt-pocket portable radio-with transistors" (page 176). that announced the production of the Regency TR-1 on October 18, 1954. That honor belonged to an American company in Indianapolis called I.D.E.A. "The introduction of this proud achievement was tinged with disappointment that our first transistorized radio was not the very first one on the market" (page 71). However, Akio Morita in Made in Japan, (N.Y., 1986) wrote that although it was the "world's smallest" it was not the first. Nick Lyons in The Sony Vision, (N.Y., 1976) claimed that Sony pioneered the "world's first pocket-size all-transistor radio" in March 1957 (page 54). The same problems of terminology and definition occur in the history of technology. Louis baseball team, but Bud Abbot demonstrated how hard it is to answer such a question (see the Sketch by Bud Abbot and Lou Costello). Transistor radio Who's On First? A Note on the Transistor Radio Lou Costello wanted to know the answer to the question "who's on first" for the St. ![]()
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