Casio: The Yubiwa Pipe Cigarette Ring, the 14-A Calculator and G-Shock

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In April 1946, engineer Tadao Kashio opened a small workshop, Kashio Seisakujo, in Mitaka, Tokyo, machining gears and microscope parts as a subcontractor. His brother Toshio invented the yubiwa pipe, a ring worn on the finger that held a cigarette so workers could smoke it to the end with their hands free, and its success funded the brothers' engineering ambitions. After seeing electric calculating machines at a 1949 Tokyo business exhibition, they finished a solenoid-based prototype in 1954, then rebuilt the design around telephone exchange relays. The result, the 14-A of June 1957, used 341 relays, and the brothers incorporated Casio Computer Co. Ltd. on June 1, 1957, installing their father, Shigeru Kashio, as its first president.

In August 1972 the Casio Mini went on sale for 12,800 yen, about a third of competing prices, selling a million units in its first 10 months and more than 10 million in all. The Casiotron watch with an automatic calendar followed in November 1974, and engineer Kikuo Ibe's "triple 10" pitch for a 10-year battery, 10-bar water resistance and a 10-meter drop led to the first G-Shock, the DW-5000C, in 1983. A rock preset programmed by Casio employee Hiroko Okuda on the 1981 Casiotone MT-40 became the beat of Wayne Smith's 1985 "Under Mi Sleng Teng," ushering in digital dancehall. Casio later left page printers in 2016 and compact digital cameras in 2018, was fined £3.7 million by the UK Competition and Markets Authority in 2019 over restricting online discounts on digital pianos, and suffered a ransomware attack in October 2024. In fiscal 2026, timepieces made up about 67 percent of its roughly 276.2 billion yen in net sales.

• The 14-A replaced multi-column keyboards, where typing 105 meant hunting through hundreds, tens and ones columns, with a single 0 to 9 key pad and one display window.
• Casio's first electronic desktop calculator, the 001, arrived in 1965 and was exported worldwide.
• Toshio Kashio developed the sound generation system for the Casiotone 201, Casio's first electronic instrument, in January 1980.
• The QV-10 of March 1995 was the first consumer digital camera with a built-in LCD screen for framing and reviewing shots.
• The company switched its name from kanji to katakana script in 1960, and by 2026 it had more than 8,200 employees.