First commercial transistor radio announced - October 18, 1954

On this day in 1954, Texas Instruments announced the invention of the first commercial transistor radio, the Regency TR-1. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello Everybody, I'm Eaves and you're tuned into
This Day in History Class, a show where we travel
back in time one day at a time. Today is October.

(00:23):
The day was October eighth. Nineteen fifty four, Texas Instruments
announced the first commercial transistor radio, the Regency t R one.
A transistor is a device that controls the flow of
electricity and electronic equipment. The device was invented in nine
when scientists at Bill Laboratories in New Jersey successfully demonstrated

(00:48):
one for the first time. The transistor was developed to
replace vacuum tubes, which were cumbersome, faulty, used a lot
of power, and produced a lot of heat. Bell Labs
announced the invention of the transistor in nine and over
the next several years, the device was improved and replaced

(01:09):
vacuum tubes and mechanical relays. The transistor was smaller than
vacuum tubes, used less energy, and was more durable. The
use of transistors also allowed for immediate operation of a device,
since there were no filaments that had to heat up.
The invention of the transistor changed the field of electronics

(01:30):
in a major way. In their early years, radios were huge,
unwildy pieces of equipment. On top of that, they used
a lot of energy. There were portable radios that used
vacuum tubes, but they were still heavy and bulky, and
vacuum tubes were still inefficient. It's likely that many companies

(01:51):
were planning to create radios using the new transistor technology,
and some did create prototypes, but the technology company Tis
Instruments was the first to offer a commercially manufactured transistor radio.
Texas Instruments, which was already producing Germanium transistors, was eager
to get the first transistor radio to the consumer market.

(02:15):
The company worked with the Regency division of a firm
called Industrial Development Engineering Associates to create the Regency t
R one. Other prototype transistor radios required manually selecting and
matching electrical parts to make them work, which made production expensive,
but an engineer working on the t R one designed

(02:37):
a feedback circuit that let production run parts be sidered
directly into the boards with manual selection. Production of the
radio was kept secret until it was unveiled on October eighteenth,
nineteen fifty four, and soon after it was offered for
sale to the public. The introduction of the t R
one made portable audio feasible and fashionable. Ads announced at

(03:00):
the t R one was so small that it could
be put in a normal suitcoat pocket. It had four
germanium transistors and a two point five bolt battery with
more than twenty hours of life. It was just five
by three by one and a quarter inches big. At first,
it was offered in four colors, ivory black, Mandarin red,

(03:21):
and cloud gray, but soon the color choices were expanded.
It cost just under fifty dollars, which is around four
hundred and seventy seven dollars nineteen, though that price was
prohibited for a lot of people. Around one hundred thousand
of the radios were sold in a year. A contemporary
press release said that quote the pocket sauce is a

(03:44):
significant achievement since it includes a high fidelity, high volume
speaker and a single battery supply, as well as all
associated receiver circuit components. People were a fan of the
radio's appearance, but it was lacking in the areas of
quality and performance. In the years after the release of
the t R one, other companies like Sony also began

(04:07):
producing transistor radios. Paving the way for later developments in
portable audio. I'm Eve STEPF Coote and hopefully you know
a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
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(04:29):
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