Sony: A Failed Rice Cooker, the Transistor Radio and the PlayStation

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Sony began in 1946 in the damaged Shirokiya department store in Tokyo's Nihonbashi, where former Imperial Navy research engineer Masaru Ibuka repaired radios and restored the shortwave reception wartime authorities had disabled. Akio Morita read about the shop in the Asahi Shimbun, rejoined his wartime colleague, and with about 190,000 yen from Morita's family they founded Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. An early electric rice cooker failed because black-market rice varied in moisture, and their Type G tape recorder weighed over 70 pounds. In 1954 Morita licensed the transistor from Bell Labs while Japan's big firms stuck with vacuum tubes, leading to the TR-55 and pocket-sized TR-63 radios.

Needing an export name, they blended the Latin sonus with the slang sonny boy to make Sony, overruling Mitsui Bank's push for Sony Electronic Industries. Morita moved to the US in 1960, hired experienced managers away from other Japanese firms despite lifetime employment norms, and refused to cut prices in downturns. Opera singer Norio Ohga set the CD at 12 centimeters to hold Beethoven's Ninth, oversaw the purchases of CBS Records in 1988 and Columbia Pictures in 1989, and the PlayStation followed in 1994. Siloed divisions later lost digital music to Apple's iPod until Kazuo Hirai's 2012 One Sony plan sold VAIO and refocused the company.

• The initials TTK were already used by a Japanese railway, and Teletech was taken in America.
• Sony held prices during recessions to recast Made in Japan as a mark of quality.
• Sony-made components ended up in US military equipment during the Vietnam War.
• Howard Stringer, Sony's first foreign CEO, cut jobs while early Spider-Man films propped up results.
• Sony now makes image sensors for nearly every smartphone and runs Crunchyroll.