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Transistor Radio Turns 50
theodp writes "Before the iPod, there was the Regency TR-1. Fifty years ago Monday, tiny Indianapolis-based I.D.E.A. partnered with TI and shook the world with the first pocket-sized AM radio, so impressing IBM chief Tom Watson that he provided a $49.95 (roughly $345 in current dollars!), four transistor TR-1 to each of his senior managers to kick-start the company's transition from valves."
For a neat one page history of the shirt-pocket sized transistor radio along with a picture of the TR-1, go here: transistor radio
http://www.busyweather.com/
UltraSparc IV: 66 million transistors
:-)
Pentium IV Prescott: 125 million transistors
Power4: 170 million transistors
So how many transistors are in the TR-1?
4
For everything else, there's vacuum tubes. (Or diodes, depending on your radio set.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Must be using one for his web server.
12:50 - press return.
Valves?
I didn't know IBM had been in the plumbing business?
Heh. Funny to think that at one time, a transistor radio would be as ostentatious as the little white iPod headphones.
Of course there were no portable headphones.
Just saying.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
On my way back from a football game where my Dad was using a transistor radio, to listen to the play-by-play, I listened to my 5cmX1cmX3cm transistor Radio Shack radio.
They are ubiquitous in our lives now, and it's hard to imagine a world without miniturized electronics.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The germanium transistor was first demonstrated privately at Bell Labs Dec. 23, 1947, by William Shockley and his team. However, production problems delayed its practical use. Until it was perfected, the invention was kept secret for 7 months and no patents were filed until 1948; the first public announcement was June 30, 1948.
Nowadays, it's more like the patent was filed 5 years ago out of thin air, first public announcement was 24 months ago. Product is sold with some bugs and patches/fixes/recalls were made in the following 24 months.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
How many people on slashdot have been alive this long?
Wow. What struck me most about that article is how much inflation there's been in 50 years. Thats 700%! I don't know about you, but to me that's just insane.
Victory or awesome!
And I think the IC's I was working on 35 years ago were produced from one inch wafers and were one transister or diode per chip which were mounted in an IC to replace a vacuum tube or valve based circuit.
But that's progress. Now you can have a 3 Ghz pentium that will put out as much heat as that old vacuum tube based technology ever could.
If you look at the expanded pic of the "shirt-pocket radio", you also see a Zenith hearing aid, which has a shape (especially considering the location of the earphone) surprisingly similar to an iPod...
"How many people on slashdot have been alive this long?"
And are still virgins?
Didnt the TR-1 only have 3 transistors? sure the TI reference design had 4, but i could swear that their engineers managed to cut one of em out to make it cheaper.
Wow, it must be a slow news day if the Slashdot editors can't find a better way to get in their mandatory daily mention of the iPod!
You say $345 with an exclamation mark as if that's a lot of money for a portable entertainment device. How much do you think an iPod costs? Or a Rio?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I was on a bus today, and I saw a kid with one of those old Shockwave tape players. You know those yellow ones that had two black hatches that would close it.
It had antiskip on the cd player version of the shockwave, and it was so cool. This was when I was back in elementary school, and I wanted one so badly.
I thought to myself, wow that thing was huge, how did we ever use tapes! and I looked around and saw all the people with ipods or other mp3 players on the bus. Even mini-disc players are way to outdated nowadays.
How quickly technology changes..
And I, for one, want to welcome the arrival of our new iPod Overlords!
-Ocelot Wreak.
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?
I can remember fishing with my dad as we listened to the Cardinals play by play on his. He won it in a national sales contest and I might add was quite the object of jealosy for having it.
If I remember right his had 9 transistors. At that time when you bought one it would tell you how many transistors it had. The more transistors the better the "quality" and the higher the price. 9 was pretty much top of the line for portables.
The Sony's where considered cheap and low quality. (and they fell apart so very easy.) If you wanted a good one there was only one way to go. RCA. Though the people from Phillips and GE had their contenders.
The RCA's had honestly better quality speakers etc so there was a difference in quality (over the cheap Japanese imports). His also took a single 9 volt battery and a small V/U meter to tell you signal strength. Even heard my first Beatles tune on it.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Tom Watson that he provided a $49.95 (roughly $345 in current dollars!), four transistor TR-1 to each of his senior managers to kick-start the company's transition from valves."
I wish I had specific references of this, but it was a practice by some portable radio manufacturers to add extra transistors just so they could market as being a *12 transistor* radio. I've seen a couple of these where they only used two poles directly from the battery i.e. as diodes. I've seen one case where they just added extra ones before the speaker which did reduce over all sound quality. Sorta like they added an extra unnessicary smoke stack to the Titanic, cause more is better.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Just for nastalga sake, I still have my grandfathers "Walkman" It's from the 50's when plastics were the big thing. It's bright red, pre-transistor AM radio about the size of a gradeschool lunchbox. It uses 3 sets of batteries. It used a 1.5 volt filimant battery, a 22.5 volt battery (about the size of a nine-volt) and the big high voltage B battery of 67 volts. It does not use an AC cord.
Going transistor improved battery life and permitted smaller size. Due to the smaller size and early speaker technology, the early transistor radios were known for their tin sound. They mostly sounded like a set of headphones on a desk. Earphones (mono in the ear) were common as was simply holding the radio up to the ear like a cell phone.
Being an early geek in those days meant taking apart some of the early transistor radios. (grade shool age) Deceptive marketing was common. Just like the standards for car audio watts (RMS, Peak, per channel, all channels together, un distorted, 10% distortion, max power at any distortion etc..).
Transistor count was the big seller.. The more the better. I remember taking apart a 9 transistor radio only to discover that only 3 of the transistors were used. 3 of them had all three leads stuck in the same hole. 3 of them were used as diodes with two leads in one hole and the other lead in another hole. It was a simple regenerative reciever, not a superhetrodyne with some semblance of fideliety.
In marketing, not much has changed in the years.
My old printer claims X number of pages ink yeild for it's color cartrige at 15% page coverage. The new printer claims it does more pages with it's high yeild cartrige. In the fine print it does 1.5X more pages but at 5% coverage. In my book, that's less yeild. The new cartrige is over twice the price. Carts refrenced are the HP 23 and the HP 78. I can get two of the former for about $45 or one of the latter for $52. Needless to say, my old printer is the primary color printer, not the new one. Thanks to the truth in advertising, they do specify how the page yeild was calculated, but they have gone a long way to imply comparing page count of these two cartridges is accurate, when it is deceptive. Do you want the 600 page count cartrige or the 900 page count one? Come on guys. point out the 600 count is with 15% coverage and the 900 count is with 5% coverage. (page counts rounded off for example. See HP's website for stated page yeild claims.
The truth shall set you free!
That reminds me of an AM radio I built from one of those copper coil kits for kids. It was more of an ear-plug than a headphone, though. And when I say ear-plug, I mean that it was a massive thing that went right down your ear canal.
Which reminds me of the first headphone I ever used. It was a single ear-plug that plugged into one of those K-Mart black and white TVs. It was plastic, but the cord was a simple twisted deal. Not much in the way of wire protection.
God, this stuff takes me back.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
My first impression seeing that picture was that the thing in the front was some recent MP3 player, put there to contrast it with the old radios.. Only reading the text below revealed it was a 1952 design. Case is quite rounded and silver and very small.
I remember the prestige accorded to the transistor count in those early radios; it was bragging rights for us kids on the playground to have the radio with the higher count. Trouble was, the manufacturers caught on to this early and soldered in fake parts to raise their total. I remember a picture in an electronics mag showing the bottom of the printed circuit board in one radio, showing all three leads of each of a couple of the transistors soldered together in as one big connected blob.
http://www.audiouk.com/info/regency-add.jpg
CPI: $342
GDP Deflator: $286
Unskilled Wage: $494
GDP Per Capita: $810
GDP: $1440
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =2269893061
Who knows how long the photos will stay up, but if you do a completed-items search on "Regency TR-1" you'll find several other examples.
I wonder how much a MINT!! RARE!!11! NWE IN BOX L@@K!! iPod will fetch in 2054?
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
I'm so sick of these players ignoring a huge chunk of the market. I can't believe this has been going on for so long!
Writen by humorist James Thurber for the New Yorker back in the late 50's or early 60s. The essay is in this book.
He writes of his drawer-full of cheap Japanese knockoffs that worked for a few days, then began to each emit a strange and unique sound - his fond reminiscing about 'Old Squeem' still makes me laugh.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
The first "production transistor radio" was actually produced by Raytheon. As part of an experiment, transistors that were mil-spec drop outs were re-used with other circuitry as "drop in" replacements for vacuum tubes. I do not remember how many were produced, but there was a genuine production run.
For those into ancient history - the first solid state production facility in the US is now the "new England Convention Center" off of 128.
An easy thing to do was combine several elements into a single tube. That meant a single power-hungry filament could support two triodes and/or pentodes, and possibly also a couple of diodes.
The circuit designs used were more interesting. A Motorola lunchbox-sized AM radio was made with 3 tubes. I remember one tube contained a pentode that was used as an RF amp, IF amp and first audio amp. They used a summing junction to sum all the input signals. At the output they used filters to seperate the three bands of frequencies.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
I might have one of these in my attic, red I think. Picked it up a garage sale though.
I've seen one where the extra transisters where just twisted together on the board, not attached to anything other then themselves.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
'which has a shape...surprisingly similar to an iPod...
...you mean a rectangle?
A transistor radio was among their first ever products that were exported, no?
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
Yes, exactly! That's the word I was trying to think of! Thank you!
For those who don't speak British English, a "valve" is what us Yanks would call a "vacuum tube". Us geezers remember going down to the drugstore with a tube out of the TV. They had a vacuum tube checker and a supply of replacement tubes.
Don't ask me why drugstores carried vacuum tubes. I don't have any idea.
When I was 5 my dad helped me build a crystal radio from scratch.
we wrapped copper wire around a TP roll, got a germanium diode, a copper strip, a 2,000ohm earphone and a board.
We wrapped the wire around the TP roll and shellaced it. We screwed the copper strip to the board with the other parts, wired it all up and I was listening to radio without batteries. I thought that was neater than hell (in 1966) and it really inspired me to experimenting.
When I was six, a kid gave me a transistor radio he dropped, it ripped the speaker, earphone jack and battery wires loose from the board and he considered it trash. I took it home, locked myself in my dads workshop and spent a while studying the schematic that was glued to the back cover. I got my dads soldering iron and fixed it. It worked. But I hid it in a cigar box because I was afraid my dad would kick my ass for using his tools without asking. My dad found the radio and I had to tell him what I did. He didn't beat me, he gave me all of his old TV and Radio repair tools to play with. That pretty much set it in stone for me from that point..
Intersting that last weeks BPL notist is close to this occurance.
It was intersting to see transistors replace vacumn tubs.I remember my first job working for a company that had just released a totally 200 watt input Solid State HAM Tranceiver you could buy. No tubes what so ever. It could do thing that no other unit could touch.
Too old to be a "boomer", too young to be "gen X"...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Looking thru all the stuff recently dug out of my dad's basement, I realize I *have* one of those Zenith hearing aids - just like that.
I wonder how hard a MP3 player casemod would be....
Cheap Engineer
When I was 5 my dad helped me build a crystal radio from scratch.
:-)
we wrapped copper wire around a TP roll, got a germanium diode, a copper strip, a 2,000ohm earphone and a board.
Yep, that's pretty much like the radio I built. Unfortunately, we were so far away from the broadcasting stations that I could only pick up the feignest of signals. The electric motor kit was much more interesting, especially after my dad explained how it could work as a generator if you applied mechanical power.
Odd as it may sound though, I never really got into electronic and mechanical design. Programming was somehow easier and more interesting.
He didn't beat me, he gave me all of his old TV and Radio repair tools to play with.
Cool! Just be careful with televisions. Many of them have charged capacitors that can give you a nasty shock, even if they've been unplugged for a few years.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
From a person which did not live in a tube world back in the old days. I must admit, I have gone back to tubes (values) for my audio needs. After rebuilding a Dynaco ST 70 and my own Tube pre-amp. I will never go back to solid state technology. I use to laugh at people that said that tube audio amps sounded better than todays gear. Well, after I have heard a tube amp. It has changed my mind.
An added benefit, it's very easy to build a simple tube amp or pre-amp.
Tubes were replaced with Transisters, but there is still a place in todays world for tubes.
I'm just building my first 300b monoblocks. I look forward to smashing my current future shop transister gear out of the way.
PBS has an excellent timeline that describes the history of the transistor,
'Transistorized! The History of the Invention of the Transisor'.
Sounds like you got into electronics at the best time. Would you recommend to your children to go into electrical engineering today?
That reminds me of an AM radio I built from one of those copper coil kits for kids. It was more of an ear-plug than a headphone, though. And when I say ear-plug, I mean that it was a massive thing that went right down your ear canal.
A crystal radio.
Sadly, every crystal radio I ever built only picked up WBAL, which turned me into a talk radio junkie at 7.
What, are you some kind of a weird kid too young for /. ??? In my time the radios mentioning "7 transistors inside" were made out of germanium transistors!
Paul B.
A Transistor radio mini-history has a picture of an early transistor circa 1947. From the website:
...USA research scientists of Bell Laboratories, Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain managed, in December 1947, to invent a solid state device that they called THE TRANSISTOR. They succeeded in creating a completely new amplifying device just by adding a second contact point to the already popular CRYSTAL DIODE based on a piece of germanium crystal with a pointed "cat's whisker" touching its surface. In 1956 in recognition for their extraordinary work they were awarded the Nobel Prize. (Can't tell from the website if this one pictured was the very first one invented by Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain of Bell Laboratories.)
Transistor inventors Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain were awarded a Nobel prize for their work in 1956. It's amazing how something so primitive went on to revolutionize the electronics industry.
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
[musing mode on]
Well, it would probably be similar to taking an original Han Solo action figure and modding it into a new, modern Jar Jar toy. An exercise in bad judgement.
You'd be better off to sell it on ebay for $1000, and invest that money in finding either a similar but empty case to fill, or just paint a new iPod silver and do some calligraphy on it. Then pocket the change.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
Even the best caps will die within a few weeks to a month. Besides, it's not the TVs that scare me, it's the microwaves... When I worked at the repair shop we used a pair of huge screwdrivers to short them caps out, and they held a charge, holy shit. spot-weld marks all over those screwdrivers. :-)
It's hard to say, the glory days are over now. Dubya has sent all the good jobs overseas.
w stuffworks.com/
/ radio.htm l#crystal
Still, it's a GOOD thing to know about electronics. And it's fun too.
Here's a great site to get kids started,
http://scitoys.com/
and
http://www.ho
And of course here's how a kid can build his own radio from stuff laying around the house..
http://scitoys.com/scitoys/scitoys/radio
Heh. True enough. Nothing like a few kilowatts to wake you up in the morning, eh? ;-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If you look at the expanded pic of the "shirt-pocket radio", you also see a Zenith hearing aid, which has a shape (especially considering the location of the earphone) surprisingly similar to an iPod...
"Why a hearing aid?" you may ask. Interesting history there - Bell Labs, probably in view of the work done by Alexander Graham Bell with the deaf and hard of hearing, allowed transistors to be used in hearing aids without royalty payments. If you have ever seen the large B batteries once used with vacuum tubes, you will understand why the transistor was such a breakthrough in creating a wearable hearing aid.
Can anyone remember when Sir Clive Sinclair developed his transistor radio? Or, for that matter, his all-transistor amplifier? I'm not certain, but they may have been even earlier.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
some portable radio manufacturers to add extra transistors just so they could market as being a *12 transistor* radio.
Oh yeah? Well, my Pentium IV has *100 million* transistors! How do ya like that, huh? huh?! - Sadly, this appears to be Intel's marketing strategy these days.
Good thing radio makers weren't competing on frequencies - "My radio goes up to 300 Mhz!" "Oh yeah? Mine goes to 350!". We'd have ended up in the terahertz range by now. At least the 4th stack on the Titanic served some purpose - IIRC, they used it to vent the galley and laundry fumes.
Oh and btw, here's an oldie I've been hanging onto for some years now. I don't really know the age of this thing, I bought it at a flea market about 15 years ago and it's in magnificent condition..
http://www.systemrecycler.com/pocketradio/
Feynman gave a lecture on this and in good science you don't imply something. Just like you should never assume.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Transistor radios were the lifeline of the yesteryears indeed ! cheers to them !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
What would hev been the history of electronics and
hw industry, if Mr. William was into HW and was born say 70 years ago. Nice thing to think about.... Probably ham radio would have been the first target and with that could have drowned the whole industry!!!!!
The Roswell crash occured in 1947. Or did it take the US government 7 years to figure out how to use the technology found in the crash?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Here is a pdf copy of the patent. Notice how the complete circuit diagram, together with a detailed description is included. That's what a patent is supposed to be, not the obvious and vague "one-click" shit they patent today.
Have you recently visited a store (e.g. Target or Wal-Mart) and tried to buy a new transistor radio (defined as a battery powered radio the size of a pack of cigarettes)? I wanted one to listen to the presidential debates. I couldn't find a transistor radio, or a headphone radio, the smallesst thing they had was a $9 portable radio cassette player that was large enough to have a carrying handle.
Sirius now makes a portable satellite radio that will move from car to car, but it requires 12V power and a nearby FM car radio (it retransmits the signal on FM and there is no earphone jack). Have you noticed there are no XM or Sirius Walkman-type radios?
I was listening to a radio interview with someone who works with Foster Parents Plan yesterday. She mentioned that in many parts of rural Africa, transistor radios still rule and are the primary method of broadcasting and sharing news across geographic distances.
TVs are expensive and require a power supply which is often not available (transistor radios can run off of batteries much more easily than TVs). Newspapers require literacy levels which are also quite difficult to come by. I won't go into the challenges around computer networks as a source of news.
Transistor radios, on the other hand have massive market penetration. The example used, I think, was rural Senegal where on average there was one transistor radio per family. That's pretty amazing considering the economic situation.
Respectfully, David Tallan
Well I guess then you can't blame Clinton either for the bad economy?
Tell me where you work so I never send even a calculator there to be repaired! I mean holy shit guys, you don't even have a high-voltage probe or something to discharge those caps?
You sound like butchers.
In 1957 (I think it was) my father had a subscription to the 'Arend', which was a Dutch version of the American magazine Eagle, a magazine for boys and girls of around 13 years old. He still has these magazines, and in there is an item about the soap box radio, which was the size and shape of one of those plastic boxes you use to carry a bar of soap around in while traveling. For that time it was an amazing thing: suddenly you had radio everywhere because it was battery powered AND portable. It's actually quite strange that we had to wait until the invention of the walkman in the 1980's before portable music really became popular because the technology has been around since the late '50's.
-- Cheers!
The typical B battery was about the size of a cassette Walkman[tm], but weighed quite a bit more, several pounds (weight US, not monetary, UK). Then you had to have your A battery for the filaments, and your C battery for the grid (technically, you might skip this one with cathode bias). Add in the wight of the larger components, the extra heat dissipated, the heavier chassis and case to protect the glass tubes from breakage (and the wearer from heat and broken glass), and you had a substantial package of fairly delicate weight and heat to tote around.
There are some things I prefer tubes for, but a hearing aid isn't one of them!
I'll be 50 next year. I'd forgotten I have to call the transistor radio, "sir".
It's not really odd to me that most folks have no clue what a vacuum tube is. It's a bit odd that most folks have no clue what a transistor is. Society has changed as much as technology over the last 50 years, at least in the USA.
50 years ago, almost everyone knew what a tube was, whether they cared or not (and most cared to some degree).[0] Today most people know what a computer or iPod is, whether they care or not, but an awful lot of folks aren't real sure what a chip is (insert joke here), and very few people under, say, 25, have more than the vaguest understanding of what a transistor is. And almost nobody cares (outside the geek communities). [1]
Part of that is simply the technology maturity, but it's also partly sociological (the two are also intertwined more than a lot of people realize).
[0] Then again, they really needed to, since instead of sending a dead TV or radio to the landfill, you generally had one or more tubes replaced, and it worked again. We weren't such a disposable society in the Tubozoic Era.
[1] In and of itself, that's neither good nor bad (or more likely both). I present it solely as a data point.
Well, which three do you see?
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here; portable music was huge fairly quickly. It was even big before the transistor radio. My parents had a portable, RCA, tube, AM radio (width and height of a school lunchbox, maybe 2 inches (5 cm) deep) from when they were dating. That puts it at late 40s or early 50s. Rock and roll took off with the aid of electronics - electric guitars, TV, car radios and
I remember sneaking one to school so we could listen during recess to the World Series. The teachers understood; so long as it only came out at recess, they ignored it - but only for something like the World Series. (Now kids text message each other in class!)