Читать книгу Pacific: The Ocean of the Future - Simon Winchester - Страница 13
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This is not the age of pamphleteers. It is the age of the engineers. The spark-gap is mightier than the pen.
—LANCELOT HOGBEN, Science for the Citizen, 1938
It was piercingly hot in Canada in the late summer of 1955—so hot, the newspapers said, that apples in Ontario were baking on the trees. Indoors it was sweltering, and those who came home from work and wished to listen to the evening news or learn how their local lacrosse teams were faring found it necessary to keep their windows open, crank up the radio’s volume, sit out on the stoop or the lawn, and hope the passing traffic didn’t drown out the broadcast.
But those few who had passed by electrical stores in downtown Winnipeg and Edmonton, in Toronto and Montréal and Vancouver—most especially Vancouver, which at the time had a sizable Japanese population, who had some prior knowledge about such things—would have noticed on sale that month a small boxlike device made from greenish-brown plastic that, all who saw it swiftly realized, brought an answer to their summertime prayers.
It was a radio set no bigger than your hand, with no wires connecting it to anything. Until August 8, when this device first went on sale, most radio sets had been pieces of furniture. They were, by and large, behemoths made of walnut veneer that needed to be dusted and polished, and that more often than not provided a resting plinth for potted plants. But this little box was different. It wasn’t furniture at all. It ran off batteries and didn’t have to be connected to the wall. It was lightweight, didn’t need time to warm up, and in fact didn’t get warm; it emitted sound the moment you turned it on, and it could go anywhere—certainly well beyond the oppressive heat of an August living room. You could use it outside, under the shade of a tree, in the cool beside the fine spray from the sprinkler. It was so neat and tidy, with its tiny plastic feetlets, that you could set it down on a table in the yard or on the lawn itself, or on a table on the porch—or it could be carried to and fro as you wished, perhaps as you went to the icebox to fetch another bottle of Molson.
It was a pretty little thing, very modern, very midcentury. Most of it seemed to be a loudspeaker, with a grille and scores of tiny perforations. There was a small red and black wheel on the side that turned it on and off, and another to adjust the volume. On the front right-hand side was a dial and a knurled, revolvable disk that allowed you to change from one CBC station to another. On this disk were words, most probably unrecognizable to all but the immigrant Japanese: “Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo,” which in English meant “Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company.”
There were two other words on the front of the little device. In raised plastic lettering across its top was embossed a lately created but suddenly quite familiar description of the electronic organelle that lay in the beating heart of this radio, and that essentially, if incomprehensibly, made it work: TRANSISTORIZED.
Then, in a minuscule oblong space above the tuning wheel, a space easily overlooked, there was the second word, which was destined to become one of the best-known brand names in the world. That word was SONY.
The tentacles of what would become a giant global corporation, whose inventions would affect the ways many millions of people took pleasure from their lives, had started extending their way east across the Pacific. The Japanese electronic century, as some would call it, had officially slithered into existence.
It is tempting to suppose that Sony sent its first radios to Canada rather than to the United States for reasons having much to do with the Second World War, then only a decade past. But the truth is more mundane. A Canadian businessman named Albert Cohen, wandering through Japan in search of opportunities, happened to spot an advertisement in a Tokyo newspaper seeking a distributor for a new kind of radio. He arranged an appointment, sought and offered terms that were mutually agreeable, closed a deal on a handshake, and lugged a crate filled with fifty radios back to his company headquarters in Winnipeg. That Sony’s first beachhead beyond Japan was thereby established among the grain elevators and green expanses of the North American prairies, a world away from Asia and the great blue expanses of the Pacific Ocean, speaks volumes: an early hint that the Pacific’s economic and cultural reach was to be unimaginably vast, almost limitless.
The man with whom Albert Cohen had his first dealings in the summer of 1955 was Akio Morita, the better-known and most public face of what would become the Sony Corporation. In 1955, Morita was well on his way to becoming the elegant silver fox of Japanese electronics. He was worldly, sophisticated, patrician (the silkily affluent heir to a Nagoya sake-brewing dynasty), and a visionary. He had a degree in physics, but he was not, strictly speaking, an engineer. And the beginnings of Sony—indeed, the beginnings of everything that would underpin Japan’s remarkable revival after the ruin and humiliations of a roundly lost war—were rooted solidly in the world of engineering and in the grimy hands of its practitioners.
Happily the man who was to be Morita’s cofounder of Sony, the much less well-remembered Masaru Ibuka, was a true engineer, a classic of the breed. By the time the pair first met, in 1944—when Ibuka was already thirty-six, a great crag of a man; bluff, myopic, and shambling; ursine and untidy; and towering over the twenty-three-year-old Morita—Ibuka was already known as a tinkerer, a maker, an inventor. In 1933, when he was still at university, he had been handed an early award (a Gold Prize from the Paris World’s Fair) for devising a way to make the glow in neon lamps appear to flow—so-called dancing neon, created by attaching a high-frequency power supply to one end of a neon tube and varying its output, a technique still much used today in advertising signs.
He was captivated by all things mechanical. He was a ham radio operator, had made his own gramophone, and had built a pair of stupendously large loudspeakers for use in a local sports stadium. He collected music boxes, player pianos, and organs, and to amuse himself, he had a remote-controlled helium balloon. He was also entranced from childhood by model railway trains, and would in time become president of the Japanese Association of Microtrains. More often than not he could be found on his knees on the tatami, reconnecting a length of miniature railroad track or tightening the screws on a steam locomotive.
It was the summer of 1944, and one desperate, last-ditch effort by the Japanese military to reverse the tide of what was now clearly an unwinnable war, that first brought Ibuka and Morita together.
The munitions ministry wanted to devise a new kind of antiaircraft missile, to harry and maybe bring down some of the American B-29s that, with their relentlessly lethal firebombing campaigns, were so devastating Japanese cities. They turned to a Tokyo maker of naval radar, the Japanese Instrument Measurements Company (JIMCO), and ordered the young naval lieutenant Morita, who had a degree in physics, to act as liaison.
Ibuka was the managing director of JIMCO, and from their first meeting, his inventive genius entirely captivated Morita. He was evidently a true lateral thinker, years before the concept was born: to solve a problem concerning the oscillations of a new radio transmitter, for instance, he had hired a score of young women, all of them music students from a nearby college, to employ their perfect pitch to help him adjust the radio to the exact frequency of a tuning fork. Such ingenuity! Morita thought. Such imagination! Ibuka-san, rough around the edges though he might be, and with a Tokyo workingman’s accent, was one memorably creative individual!
Either the heat-seeking missile was never made or else it did no good, for eight months later the war was over. But the professional collegiality that had sprung up between Morita and Ibuka developed swiftly into an inseparable and lifelong friendship. The first stirrings of creative energy soon began to display themselves.
Japan in the immediate aftermath of the war was steeped in a miasma of misery. The population—throughout Japan, though most particularly in the capital, Tokyo—was afflicted by a hitherto unknown condition that had been given a new name, plucked from psychiatrists’ manuals: it was kyodatsu, a phenomenon that mixed exhaustion with despair in equal measure.
Hardly surprising: Barely half the inhabitants had a roof over their heads. One in five had tuberculosis. On all sides in the capital were ruined buildings, broken water mains and sewage drains, shattered schools. There was no public transportation: all the buses were destroyed; the trolley lines and their cars had been obliterated. There were the daily degradations and humiliations of the American occupation; there was a pervasive lack of work and its kin: a want of money and widespread beggary and destitution. There was also, or so it seemed, a collapse in society’s moral fiber, with gang warfare, prostitution, thievery, and black marketeering pasted onto a national sense of remorse, guilt, resentment, and a deeply felt, unfocused, and chance-directed bitterness.
Yet, for all that, as 1946 got shakily under way, something curious happened: the Japanese people began to ready themselves, though they knew it not, to rise up and display a mettle quite unimaginable in its scope, heft, and range. And the Pacific Ocean was the theater in which this display was to be most vigorously mounted.
In those first months after the surrender, the country was gripped by a spasm of self-repair, of make-do and mending, of precipitous institutional about-faces and adaptations. Factories that had weeks before been making war materials switched their production lines to start making items needed not by generals and admirals, but by the bone-tired civilians and by the ragged menfolk returning from the battlefields. So bomb casings became charcoal burners, sitting neatly upright on their tail fins and helping households get through that first bitter winter. Large-caliber brass shell cases were modified as rice containers, while tea caddies were fashioned from their smaller shiny cousins. A searchlight mirror maker turned out flat glass panes to repair thousands of smashed Tokyo windows; and for country dwellers, a fighter plane engine piston maker turned his factory to building water pumps. A piston ring fabricator named Soichiro Honda took small engines used during the war as radio generators and strapped them onto the frames of Tokyo’s bicycles—the resulting Bata-Bata motorcycles, the name being onomatopoeic, later evolved into a brand of bike still famed from 1950s Japan as the Dream. Its popularity and commercial success heralded the birth of today’s automobile giant, the Honda Motor Company.
As with Honda, so with the company that would soon be founded by Ibuka and Morita. It was Ibuka himself who first set matters in train. Within moments of the emperor’s broadcast to his nation, announcing the surrender, Ibuka told his radar-making colleagues that he was returning to Tokyo, immediately. He had divined, with what now seems almost messianic clarity, that the country’s future depended on engineers and on their ardent use of technology. He also believed that only in the country’s capital was such progress possible.
As he packed his bags, he dared others to go with him. Six men did—one of them, Akira Higuchi, remarking later that he made his decision “in two shakes, and left without a second thought. It was as if we were communicating telepathically. I followed him then, and I have never left him.”
Higuchi, who eventually became Sony’s head of personnel, was much like Ibuka: a memorable figure. He was a formidable mountaineer, for example, and in later life kept a globe in his office studded with tiny flags indicating the more than one hundred peaks he had scaled. He was still employed by Sony into his eighties and celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday on the top of a ski slope near Lake Tahoe, in the California Sierra.
So Ibuka and Higuchi and their five colleagues took themselves down to Tokyo and promptly set up shop. They managed to rent for a pittance a cramped third-floor room in a near-derelict department store building, and bought desks and worktables. They first agreed on a name, Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute, though they then changed it, twice, before finally agreeing on Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company—in Japanese, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, familiarly to be called Totsuko.
Despite having no business or any real idea of what the company might do, make, or even dream about, Masaru Ibuka next wrote out a formal company prospectus. The handwritten ten-page document—written vertically on horizontally lined paper, with blots and crossings-out, and the uncertain look of a schoolboy essay—is preserved now in a specially made glass display case in the Sony archives in Tokyo. It still offers a model for what a company, anywhere in the world, might aspire to be.
According to an equally lovingly preserved English translation of the prospectus, the purpose of Ibuka’s firm was “to establish an ideal factory that stresses a spirit of freedom and open-mindedness, and where engineers with sincere motivation can exercise their technological skills to the highest level.”
We shall, he pledged, “eliminate any unfair profit-seeking exercises” and “seek expansion not only for the sake of size.” Further, “we shall carefully select employees . . . we shall avoid to have [sic] formal positions for the mere sake of having them, and shall place emphasis on a person’s ability, performance and character, so that each individual can fully exercise his or her abilities and skills.
“We shall distribute the company’s surplus earnings to all employees in an appropriate manner, and we shall assist them in a practical manner to secure a stable life. In return, all employees shall exert their utmost effort into their job.”
Finally, his new company would help his country. Its formally stated national intent was to help “reconstruct Japan, and to elevate the nation’s culture through dynamic cultural and technological activities.”
Yet this high-flown language—in truth more Grandisonian than grandiloquent, as the firm’s later progress would show—masked many early difficulties. Neither Ibuka the man nor Totsuko his company had any real idea what to make. The first invention was a crude electric rice cooker, no more than a wooden tub with a flat aluminum element at its bottom. You poured in rice and water, plugged in the device, and the mixture’s conducting wetness triggered the switch that powered up the heating element. The rice was cooked and duly dried, and the nonconducting dryness broke the circuit and switched the device off. It was in theory a fine and clever idea—except, the vagaries of the year’s crop made it almost impossible to cook the rice properly. Sometimes it was fully cooked, sometimes not. Sometimes the machine switched itself off while the rice was still wet, like porridge. At other times the cooked rice was quite dry but had the consistency of a fistful of shotgun pellets. As a result, Totsuko’s first foray into the mercantile world was a complete dud, and the hundreds of rice cookers languished unbought on the office shelves, for years.
But before long the firm did in fact find its feet, once Ibuka had insisted that instead of flailing around with some truly eccentric ideas (building miniature golf courses on bomb sites, selling sweetened miso soup), his engineers stick to their core pursuit: electronics. So, by the end of 1946, when Akio Morita, newly released from the navy, joined his new friend’s firm, the business model swiftly focused the minds of all the employees on one particular and widespread electronic need: the repair of radio sets.
All Japanese households owned radios, but during the war some had been damaged by the bombings, and others had been destroyed by the much-feared Japanese secret police, the Kempeitai, who had campaigned to stop civilians from listening to American shortwave propaganda. Now, with peace returned, households wanted cheerful music; they wanted to hear such news as the American censors allowed (official announcements, information), and radio was the obvious best means of disseminating it. So Ibuka and his team—now swollen to more than twenty, outgrowing their one-room premises to fill one floor of the old department store—began doing real business. A reporter from Asahi Shimbun stopped by. Ibuka, with his shrewd sense of what made good PR, must have delighted in the resulting article, which described his radio repair business and reported that the work was being performed “quite apart from any commercial motive.” The door was soon thronged by customers bearing broken radios.
Steadily the inventive energies accelerated—as did the quality of the technical work. The firm first made a voltmeter that was mundane enough in its own right, but cleverly enough designed and built that it got the attention of occupation forces’ quartermasters, who sent samples back to America to be used as benchmarks of technical excellence. Suddenly a Japanese machine was winning kudos beyond Japan. Then Ibuka, swelling with pride, made the first fully functioning and complex electrical device that would perform the kind of task for which the firm would eventually win worldwide fame. He made a tape recorder.
This machine was expensive both to develop and to construct, but it eventually sold in respectable numbers. He was able to build it because Akio Morita and his old, rich, and highly traditional family decided to put money, serious money, into the young company. It was the firm’s first investment, at the now-legendary sum of 190,000 yen. The Morita Company, run at the time by the fourteenth generation of farmer-dynasts, had for centuries concentrated on businesses sacred to the spirit of the nation: on the growing, harvesting, and storage of rice and soybeans and on the delicate brewing of sake, miso, and soy sauce. Yet now, and with remarkable prescience, the clan elders were able to discern a future of a very different kind. Helped in addition by an abiding faith in the artless genius of Masaru Ibuka, the family chiefs felt a stirring of commercial possibility—and instructed their son and presumed heir1 to join the new firm as partner, and go back down to Tokyo and utterly transform the Pacific world.
Ibuka was fascinated by the idea that the human voice, music, the sounds of daily life, could all be mysteriously transplanted onto a length of thin brown tape and played back through a loudspeaker. He first saw a tape recorder—a concept that had been born in Germany a decade before—at the American censors’ office at the main Tokyo radio station. He did not know how it had been done—maybe the tape was plastic; probably it was in some way magnetic; maybe magnets were employed in some fashion to spread the sound onto the tape. However it was made, though, and whatever the magic of the tape itself, he could easily imagine the possibilities of such a device. It would be ideal for education, for training, even for what was then so keenly needed in Japan: sheer entertainment. He vowed that the firm would build and sell such a machine, whatever the cost, whatever the likelihood of immediate profit.
Masaru Ibuka, a lifelong collector of model trains, ham radios, and helium balloons, was the engineering genius behind the first Japanese transistor radio, and later the Trinitron and the Walkman—and the cofounder of Sony Corporation. Associated Press.
It took a while for the company’s accounting chief, a dour man sent down from Nagoya to look after the family’s investment, to sign off on the project. Morita and Ibuka infamously took him to a black market restaurant and got him drunk enough to agree. Once the money was available, the team sat down to solve the technical challenges.
Obtaining tape was the greatest problem, and from the outset the company decided it should manufacture the tape, rightly anticipating that owners of the recorders would need to buy ever more reels of the stuff. The plastic that was used in the American recorders was simply not available in Japan. Cellophane, which could be found, stretched, and so was useless. The only other available substance that could be magnetized was paper. So a specialized papermaking company was found in Osaka, thousands of sheets of the smoothest available craft paper were ordered, and Morita and Ibuka settled down to cut them into countless narrow strips.
The strips were then glued together and laid out on the factory floor—hundreds of feet of them, weighted to stop them from blowing about. All thirty-six of the company employees—the voltmeter business had nearly doubled the staff count—now armed with brushes made of fine raccoon belly hair, fell to their knees and, their heads bowed like monks in a scriptorium, applied with infinite care a magnetic paste concocted from a mixture of ferric oxide and geisha-quality white face powder. There was a down-home aspect to the business: the ferric oxide had been cooked up in frying pans; the powder had been bought wholesale from a cosmetics company.
The resulting pasted tape was left overnight to dry, and then tested the next morning by being run over magnets connected to speakers. The result was the so-called talking paper—fragile, scratchily imperfect in the first tests, but increasingly more workable as the cutters and the gluers and the brush wielders got better at their tasks. The acceptable batches were then wound onto reels, and these were placed on a hefty machine that had been cobbled together from motors and magnets, and was equipped with an external microphone and a built-in loudspeaker.
Finally, here was the prototype of the Totsuko Company’s G-type tape recorder, a bulky hundred-pound confection of steel and copper and glass and raccoon-hair-pasted paper tape. It worked, quite reliably. It would both record and play back whatever the microphone picked up. So the firm painstakingly hand-built fifty recorders, priced at 160,000 yen each—more than twice what was then the annual Japanese salary—and then crossed its corporate fingers. The dour Morita Company accounting chief, back again from the countryside and by now wise enough to remain sober, waited nervously to see how the market would react and whether his masters’ investment was secure.
If it was, it was more by luck than judgment. Sales were painfully slow. Everyone who saw and heard the device was impressed. A noodle shop bought the very first and tried to encourage a primitive form of karaoke, which drew in crowds of diners. But few others wanted something so heavy or so costly.
The company then began doing what it subsequently became famous for, something that the Japanese people had been doing for centuries: shrinking things. The old notions—the neatly nested lacquered box, the tightly concertina’d fan, the foldable-to-nothing room screen—were for the first time translated into this electronic corner of the Japanese corporate world. The first giant tape recorder—those few of the original fifty that did sell went to the government and into the courts, for transcription—was cunningly distilled into something that was neater, lighter, and very much smaller. This second version was called the Model H, for “home.” It weighed just thirty pounds and cost eight thousand yen. It was followed by the Model M, which was designed to suit the fledgling movie industry; and finally, by the truly popular and successful Model P, a cheap and miraculously how-do-they-do-it? lightweight portable tape recorder, with a shoulder strap and an appearance of near-chic modernity—which started selling at the rate of six thousand units each year.
With figures like these, and the firm’s newfound ability to come up with new and smaller models and then swivel its production lines to satisfy public demand at what seemed a moment’s notice, the little company could afford to rent more space and hire more people. By the end of the 1940s, Totsuko had a staff of almost five hundred and had expanded offices in a former barrack block in a hilly western suburb, where the company is still based six decades later.
Shrinking the product seemed to have been the key. The engineers who mastered the mysteries of squeezing more and more features into smaller and smaller volumes were the early heroes of the story. But in later years, they were to be greatly assisted by an invention from the late 1940s—an American invention, as it happens—that would allow the small to be made tiny, the tiny minuscule, and for a real electronic revolution to get itself properly under way.
This was the transistor. This small, simple, and now all too easily made electronic amplifying device is widely accepted as one of the greatest of all modern inventions. It is an essential in the making of all today’s computers, is key to the birth of the Pacific coast technologies of Microsoft and Apple and more generally of Silicon Valley (so named, since 1974, as silicon is the transistor’s core material), and helped light the fuse of Japan’s postwar success. It was invented, all agree, on December 23, 1947. A trio of electronics engineers, who would later win the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery, made the first working transistor where they were employed, at Bell Labs, in Murray Hill (a New Jersey suburb founded by a spritzer maker who had migrated there from Murray Hill, in Manhattan). It was one of the last gasps of Atlantic coast inventiveness in a field of technology that would become increasingly dominated by the much greater ocean to the west.
It took Drs. Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley2 years of intense application to maneuver the tiny slivers of semiconducting germanium and the even tinier conducting electrodes of pure gold leaf into performing their magical feats of amplification. But once they had achieved this world-changing miracle, the vacuum tube (that fragile, hot, cumbersome, and slow-to-warm-up valve that had managed to switch and amplify electrical signals before) was effectively retired, to be replaced by the semiconductor and the new-made transistor. Once such transistor-based circuitry could be integrated onto single pieces of silicon, eventually allowing thousands and then millions of transistors to be etched onto a slice of semiconductor no larger than a fingernail, the modern high-technology world, or at least a substantial part of it, began to assume the complexion it still has today.
Masaru Ibuka became immediately intrigued by what he learned of the transistor. News of its invention trickled into the Japanese papers, though initially the only suggested use most could imagine—a use that took advantage of its tininess—was in the making of hearing aids, which were seldom worn in Japan. So in 1952, when Ibuka went on his first-ever journey to the United States—“[A] stunning country!” he reported. “Really fantastic. Buildings brightly lit. Streets jammed with automobiles”—he was not initially bound for Murray Hill. The sole official purpose of his expedition was to see how tape recorders, then still the company’s core (and really, only) business, were being used.
He worked hard. He discovered many new uses for the recorder, and each time, he sent telegrams back to Tokyo demanding action, and Morita would invariably comply. One suggestion was to start making recordings in stereo. Within days, Morita’s engineers had solved some trivial technical challenges, whereupon Morita himself, exhibiting his soon to be legendary marketing acumen, cleverly approached NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster, and offered it equipment that would allow it to present a thirty-minute radio broadcast in this newfangled stereophonic manner. On December 4, 1952, NHK introduced its stereo experiment, “produced” as the continuity announcer solemnly intoned, “by Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation and NHK.” It was a stunning success. Thousands heard it and responded with unalloyed enthusiasm. “Our cat, who had been sleeping on the foot-warming table,” wrote one listener, “was shocked by the sound-effects and jumped out of the room.” The reports were telegraphed to America, and back to a clearly elated Ibuka.
By chance he was now coming toward the end of his expedition. He was staying at the Taft Hotel in New York—and on a night now famous in company lore, was being kept relentlessly awake by loud music from the Roxy Theatre nearby. Lying sleepless in his hotel bed, he suddenly connected two ideas that were floating through his mind.
First, Western Electric, parent company of Bell Labs, the inventor of the transistor, had just announced that it was looking to license outside companies to produce transistors in bulk. Second, Ibuka knew he had more than forty newly hired scientists of exceptional brainpower still tweaking the finer points of the company’s tape recorders, but with not a great deal else to occupy their minds. So, without asking for anyone’s agreement back home, he spent his final hours in America applying for the necessary production license—characteristically dismissing the idea that anyone at company HQ might balk at the twenty-five-thousand-dollar fee being demanded for it.
He must have pondered the matter more deeply as his Northwest Airlines DC-6 thundered westward toward and then across the Pacific, and whenever he got out to stretch his legs in the increasing chill of the airports at Minneapolis and Edmonton, Anchorage and Shemya, a lonely and gale-swept U.S. Air Force outpost in the Aleutian Islands. When finally he arrived back at Haneda Airport two days later, he was convinced: “Radios,” he declared to the assembled senior staff. “We are going to make this transistor. And we are going to use it to make radios—radios that are small enough so that each individual will be able to carry one around for his own use, with a power that will enable civilization to reach even those areas that have no electric power yet.”
A stunned silence greeted his announcement. “Too wild, too risky” was how one of the company managers summed up their reactions. Maybe the established, big-time companies (Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Hitachi) could make them. They already had licensed agreements with Bell to make their own transistors, and they had the resources to do so. But not tiny Totsuko, the new kid on the block.
There were financial and bureaucratic problems—getting twenty-five thousand dollars out of the company coffers was trying enough; getting these dollars wired out of currency-starved Japan was at first well-nigh impossible. There were also technical problems, which Ibuka solved through determination and prescience, but also with the help of the figure who would become the third member of the triumvirate of titans of this story, a brilliant young geophysicist and volcanologist named Kazuo Iwama. He came from the government’s main seismological observatory, and like everyone else at Totsuko, he knew next to nothing about semiconductors.
But Iwama proved to be a phenomenally quick study. He and Ibuka flew back to America in the summer of 1954, to learn more about transistor technology, the revenue from tape recorder sales covering their hotel bills and food. The Sony Archives today hold the fruits of that three-month visit: four fat file folders crammed with hundreds upon hundreds of blue one-page onionskin paper air mail letters that Kazuo Iwama sent back, often several at a time, every single day.
The letters are crammed with detail, tissue-thin Rosetta stones of jumbled numbers, arcane formulas, Chinese ideographs, Japanese phonetic scripts, and a scattering of English words and phrases, together with fine filigree drawings of crucibles and diagrams of oscillators and depictions of circuitry that give the letters the appearance of some strange new art form, the designs for the future of an exotic new world. “Zone leveling single crystal,” one letter reads. “Pure paraffin wax,” another. “Detexile paper—no sulfur.” The assembled papers constitute a small encyclopedia of transistor wisdom, a distillate of all that was then known in America about this magical new device. And in 1954, all of it headed westward to Japan, there to help create an economic, eventually transpacific revolution.
There were other challenges. Even in the early 1950s, the Japanese still felt something of a sense of cultural cringe, a pervasive lack of self-confidence. Years of hard work and dedication had improved the appearance of most Japanese cities, but the shame and humiliation of the war still exerted a powerful drag on progress. Morita recalls being in Germany—noting how rapidly it had rebuilt its own ruined cities—and having a shopkeeper in Düsseldorf offer him an ice cream with a miniature paper parasol stuck in it, remarking kindly that it came from his country. Is this all we are good for? he asked himself. Is this what the world thinks of us?
Yet it was rather more complicated than this. I am sure I am not alone in believing that many East Asian sciences, in particular, have long suffered, have long been held back, by the basic Asian concept of “face,” of what the Japanese term mentsu. This (which, very broadly, relates to the giving of respect and the protection of one’s own dignity and regard) plays a profoundly important role in the social exchanges of many countries in the northwestern Pacific. The socially lethal consequences of losing face or, more dangerously, of causing others to lose it, may well have inhibited certain kinds of scientific progress, in large part because such consequences militate against experimentation, which invariably embraces failure, even public failure. Picking oneself up and beginning again, making the experiment subtly different, and performing many experiments until finally one works—such is the essence of scientific advance. And this was not always an easy concept for Asian scientists to accept.
This is not to say that failure plays no part in Japanese society—far from it, indeed. To watch a sushi chef, for example, compelling his apprentice to cook tamago (the egg-and-vinegar-and-soy-sauce omelet that is a key component of a full-blown nigiri dinner) is to watch the pursuit of perfection through the repetition of countless attempts, most of which initially fail. Time and again the youngster falls short of making satisfactory tamago, and each time, the master contemptuously throws it away. Yet no shame is attached to the apprentice’s failures, even though they seem to happen day after day and day. For, eventually, one hopes, the boy succeeds in this crucial task, is ultimately inducted into the corps of the minimally accomplished, and then slowly, painstakingly, makes his way toward becoming an acceptable sushi chef. Failure is just part of the process—in this and many other callings in Japanese life.
But science is very different from sushi making. Japanese cuisine is a time-honored craft, with teachers (sensei) who will cajole and berate an apprentice along the hard road to success. A scientist, on the other hand, has to engage alone, in a quest for the undiscovered and the unknown. He has to trust himself to do so without a sensei at his elbow, with only his own curiosity to compel him. This would be a formidably difficult challenge for any scientist. For one who might be further burdened by the concept of “face,” by the abhorrence of public failure, even more so.
The great empiricists, from Bacon and Galileo through to Watson and Crick, all failed, but a mark of their greatness was that they never abandoned their quest for scientific truth. The same cannot easily be said of those early East Asian scientists, particularly those who worked during the years of the Enlightenment in the West. Such advances as were made in Europe of the time were simply not happening in the East, no matter the centuries of progress (most especially Chinese progress) in the years before. Puzzlement over just why this was has generated interminable debate over the years. The so-called Needham Question3—why, after so much earlier progress, was there so little advance in China after the fifteenth century?—distills this, and has never been satisfactorily answered. Face is suggested as a component, one among many.
It was clearly a component in those early Totsuko days. One member of the research team working on the licensed transistors remarked that “the voice of Bell Labs is like the voice of God”—implying that for his Japanese colleagues to try to do anything different from the way the Americans were doing things back in Murray Hill would be to court failure, disaster, and the consequent loss of mentsu—and if not that, then perhaps also to humiliate the generosity of the licensees at Bell Labs, to cause them to lose face also. Respect for others, for elders, for perceived betters—these were concepts similarly central to Chinese and Japanese thinking: while it was dangerously uncomfortable to lose face yourself, it was unforgivably shameful to cause another to lose face. So, at first, timidity ruled in the Totsuko laboratories on the floors high above the tape recorder production line. Everyone was nervous, and for many weeks during 1953 and the first months of 1954, nothing very much was done, and less was accomplished.
Such hesitancy sorely tested Ibuka and his team of leaders, all of whom were doing their best to spur the scientists upstairs to do their best. Months after their successful purchase of the Western Electric transistor license, it was starting to seem as if they might never create anything better than the American model.
They seemed unable in particular to take the radical steps necessary to achieve the one technically risky but most commercially vital thing: to create a unique kind of transistor that was powerful enough and would work at a high enough frequency to allow the miniature radio set that Masaru Ibuka demanded his company manufacture to work. And this was causing major problems for the accountants. The income from the tape recorder business might still be healthy, but the burn rate (the payment of salaries to all these scientists and engineers who for all these complicated reasons were achieving rather little) was getting out of hand.
Months ensued, of cajolery and chemistry, of patience and physics. Ibuka and Iwama continued to write home from America, cabling their more urgent instructions for making the needed transistors. BUY HEAVY DUTY DIFFUSION FURNACE, one cable read. ACQUIRE DIAMOND GRINDER FOR SLICING GERMANIUM CRYSTALS, read another. Then, slowly, beating against the undertow of traditional thinking, the team in Japan started to nudge its way toward success. The timid became the tentative. Hesitancy morphed into determination, and the dragging weight of mentsu began to evaporate. Progress started, and through the mist the vision of the true Japanese transistor started to solidify.
The first device was completed late in the summer of 1954, while Ibuka and Iwama were still in America. It was in essence just a fair copy of that made at Bell Labs—a so-called point-contact transistor, primitive and not so small. But the principle was established: the needle on the detecting oscillator swung, with all watching nervously, indicating that the gadget was indeed creating an amplified output. By the time Iwama arrived back home, the team already had a more sophisticated model, a junction-type transistor with a perfectly cut germanium crystal—sliced with a rusty old cutting machine that had been found out in the rain in a Tokyo suburb—that was making the oscillator swing its needle even more vehemently. The little company that could was finally on its way to perfecting an invention.
The technology behind what is now an entirely routine procedure—even if we don’t entirely understand what they are doing, we are well accustomed now to seeing images of workers in protective suits in brilliantly lit, clean rooms, directing the etching of tiny circuits onto minuscule slices of semiconducting material—was, in the 1950s, dauntingly complex. But using a procedure that Bell Labs had tried and discarded, a technique known as phosphorous doping, Totsuko eventually made the breakthrough it had long sought.
In June 1955, six months after the Iwama expedition to America, the company set up its first grown-crystal transistor production line. In the first weeks, maybe only five in a hundred of them worked; Ibuka’s sanguine view was that so long as a single transistor worked, then perfecting the production technique could be accomplished at the very same time that production was under way. So the button was pressed, the factory started producing, and hundreds of tiny radio-frequency, high-powered, grown-crystal, phosphorous-doped Japanese-made transistors began cascading off the line.
Now all the company had to do was make a radio to put them in; to establish a brand name under which to market and sell this radio; and then proceed to change the lives of millions. This is what Ibuka demanded, and this is what he, Kazuo Iwama, and Akio Morita achieved.
There were hiccups, of course. An American company based in Indianapolis, named Regency, launched the first-ever transistor radio, the TR-1, in October 1954. “See it! Hear it! Get it!” blared the advertisements. Jewelry stores in New York and Los Angeles sold the sleek little sets for $49.95. The TR-1 sold well initially, but performed poorly: radio reception was often scratchy, and the set ran out of power too quickly to be of much use.
The first-ever Totsuko radio rolled off the production line in the spring of 1955. Called the TR-52, it was a tall rectangle, the size of a large cigarette packet. The four hundred square holes of its white plastic speaker grille looked like tiny windows, leading critics to say it resembled Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer’s UN headquarters, opened in New York two years before, and causing the radio to be called “the UN Building.” Totsuko made a hundred of them, but the TR-52 never went on sale, because the grille bent and peeled off in hot weather. It was, or could have been, a major embarrassment.
However, the Bulova Watch Company saw the prototype—in cool weather, presumably—and very much liked the concept. Buoyed by the news of Regency’s very modest success, Bulova reached out to Morita and ordered one hundred thousand of his radios, a staggering number.
Yet, to the dismayed astonishment of all back in Japan, Morita balked. He refused to take the order as offered. He did so because the American firm declared that it wanted to sell the radio in America under the Bulova name—and to that, Morita, a proud man, simply would not and could not agree. Especially since, just a few days prior to receiving the order, he and his colleagues had decided to rename their company, to call it Sony.
The employment of the name Sony came about entirely because of the American market. Morita had found that almost no one in the United States could pronounce either Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, the company’s formal name, or its diminutive, Totsuko. Something easier was needed, he wrote in a company memo. Something short; four-lettered, if possible. Something memorable, like “Ford.”
The Totsuko principals explored only modestly, searching either for an existing word or for an arbitrary word—Kodak, created at the whim of George Eastman fifty years before, seemed an ideal. They thought of two-letter words, with which the Japanese language abounds, but to which English mainly consigns prepositions. They considered three-letter combinations (NBC, CBS, NHK). Perhaps their own existing initials, TTK, might work. But then they began to think of four-letter combinations. The name of Ford kept striking Morita as ideal, as being brand perfection—so he and Ibuka combed through their various dictionaries. As to whether they had a Latin dictionary to hand, corporate history is silent; but somehow or other they eventually came across the Latin word for sound (the ultimate product of all their engineering), and liked what they found: the Latin word sonus. Five letters, true, but very nearly perfect.
Since 1928, when Al Jolson had sung, “Climb upon my knee, Sonny boy, / Though you’re only three, Sonny Boy,” the term Sonny had won widespread affection, especially in America. Occupation forces, now three years gone, would throw sticks of Wrigley’s gum to children, calling out, “There you are, sonny!” The word had pleasing connotations. It echoed the Latin word. It was easy to pronounce. It had universal appeal. And to make it into a Ford-like quadrilateral just a small modification in pronunciation and spelling was needed. Thus, in 1955, the word Sony was born. The word. The company. And history.
Stubborn to the end, Bulova refused to use the name on its products. “Who ever heard of Sony?” asked the president. Akio Morita politely replied, “Half a century ago people would have asked—who ever heard of Bulova?” But no ice was cut. The American’s heart did not melt. And so Morita, with exaggerated courtesy, left the office—without the precious order for a hundred thousand radios. If Japan’s first transistor radio was going to sell in America, then it would be called a Sony—and the Sony team would have to do their best to sell it themselves. The company’s future was now very much on the line.
A concatenation of curious events then got under way. The melting plastic grille prevented the firm from ever producing a significant number of the TR-52s that Bulova had wanted. Instead, the more modish and functional TR-55 was the radio that made its debut in Winnipeg in the late summer of 1955. This was the radio bought by a lucky few blisteringly hot Canadians, and which allowed them to listen to the CBC while under their garden shade trees. And if any of the sets found their way to the United States, it was more by luck than adroit corporate judgment.
Whether the American makers of the Regency TR-1 ever saw an example of the Sony radio remains unknown. But something frightened them or their backers. For, suddenly, the firm announced that it would stop manufacturing the sets and would withdraw from the marketplace. It was a decision (still quite inexplicable, even at this remove) that left a gaping hole in the radio marketplace, and one that the newly named Sony Corporation4 was poised, and happy, to exploit.
The device that Sony then made in an effort to fill this gap was designated the TR-63, the so-called pocketable radio. Company lore has it that Sony created the word pocketable, but the word made its first recorded appearance in the English language as far back as 1699. The same internal histories suggest also that this radio wasn’t exactly as pocketable as the brochures had it. It certainly didn’t fit into the breast pockets of most Japanese shirts. The wily Mr. Morita, it is said, had his salesmen’s shirts modified with a slightly bigger pocket, so their demonstrations of pocketability could invariably progress without mishap.
Such claims may well have been buffed by time and expensive PR firms, and perhaps understandably so. The event that truly made this elegant little radio famous, and that made Sony a familiar name into the bargain, was entirely true, and involved a robbery.
The tale appeared on page 17 of the New York Times of Friday, January 17, 1958. Most of the other news items close by were quite routine. Noël Coward had a cold, and so could not go on for his matinee performance of Nude with Violin. Winston Churchill’s actress-daughter Sarah, who had already been fined fifty dollars for disorderly conduct in Malibu, was now in the hospital suffering from exhaustion and emotional upset. A twenty-five-year-old prostitute named Sally Mae Quinn had squeezed her evidently rather slender self through an eight-inch window to become the first person ever to break out of a prison for women in Greenwich Village—though the trail of blood on the roadway thirty-five feet below the window suggested to police she might have something of a limp.
But the lead story on page 17 was of somewhat greater moment: “4,000 Tiny Radios Stolen in Queens,” read the headline. The story was a sensation. A manager named Vincent Ciliberti, turning up for his morning shift at Delmonico International, an import-export company based across from the Sunnyside rail freight station in Long Island City, had discovered to his alarmed dismay that, during the night, a posse of thieves had broken in through a second-floor window and taken “400 cartons of green, red, black and lemon-colored radios.”
The men had then, apparently displaying great fortitude and eagerness, broken no fewer than four locks to get into a freight elevator, backed a truck up to a loading bay, moved the radios in their boxes onto a pair of skids, and then hauled them onto the back of the truck, and vanished into the darkness.
Each carton held ten of these tiny radios, which Delmonico had been holding before sending them off to the stores to sell at $40 apiece. Some $160,000 worth of high-tech merchandise had just disappeared into the wilderness of outer New York City. It was the lead story on the city’s radio stations throughout the day. Detectives were investigating what was said to be the biggest heist of electronics equipment in American history. More than fifty potential witnesses were questioned at length. No one, of course, had seen a thing.
Then, confirming the adage about ill winds and the doing of good, came a crucial piece of information. Delmonico, reported the Times, “is the sole importer and distributor of Sony Radio, built in Japan. Each of the $40 radios is 1¼ inches thick, 2¾ inches wide and 4½ inches high.” A search suggests that this was the first time the name Sony had ever appeared in the New York Times.
Most crucially of all—and most delightfully, so far as Tokyo was concerned—it was only these Sony-brand radios that had been taken. Left behind, unclaimed and disdained, were twenty cases of other radios, and several tons of other electronics equipment. Since only the Sony devices were taken, it suggested to most readers of the paper that Sony radios were the highest-value items, the only radios worth stealing. If the thieves thought they were good and valuable, then they probably were.
That truly set the market afire. The little radio promptly became an essential. To this day, most Americans of a certain age remember their first transistor radio: a small plastic box, with a tinny loudspeaker and perhaps an earphone, that could be smuggled into high school, perhaps so that a baseball game could be listened to during algebra; or taken in the Impala at night to provide soft music while one was parked on a clifftop, hoping for rather more than the view.
All of a sudden an entire new industry swept into being, an industry bent on employing electronics, and devices with electronics at their heart, for the sole purpose of entertaining, amusing, and informing the public—either en masse or, more often, in person. Other manufacturers might continue to satisfy other, more traditional demands of heating, lighting, clothing, feeding, and moving the public about. Others might build cars or ships, mine coal, make stoves or washing machines or razor blades. But this new industry skillfully blended technology with the humanities, married the machine to the artist; and by doing so, its leaders were seeking to improve the daily lives of the average person by amusing and interesting him, by playing on his emotions and to his sentiments. It did so by the employment of transistors, semiconductors, and printed circuit boards.
The term consumer electronics was instantly coined5 to describe this new business—backed by an industry that was born on the Pacific Rim, and has in one form or another come to play a sustaining central role in the betterment of human life, in most corners of the world.
And Sony, in Tokyo, one of the first entrants into the business that it had invented, promptly did its best to satisfy the market it had created. Factories expanded and hummed with energy, and hired thousands; and more plants were built, some hastily, most in more considered fashion, and with both investors and company bosses now cleaving to a firm belief in the firm’s ever-more-settled future. Smokestacks belched, machines roared, heavily laden trucks lumbered off to the airport—entire cargo planes had to be chartered from the newly formed Japan Air Lines to meet Christmas demand—and containers, containers, containers were packed with boxes, bound in those early days for Seattle, Long Beach, and San Francisco Bay, and later for just about every major maritime port.
The containers were eventually to be crammed with much more than cartons of simple radio sets. The inventions that would be dreamed up by Masaru Ibuka and his swiftly expanding teams of engineers included microphones and videocassettes, computers and video cameras, games and storage devices, and a thousand other essentially inessential gadgets for the improvement of the daily lot of lots of people. The Walkman—a tape player that didn’t record, seen initially as a heresy for a company that had made its name by recording sounds and not simply playing them—was a worldwide success.6 The Trinitron—which Ibuka said later was the creation of which he was most proud—made full-color high-quality television inexpensively available to all.
A change in perception also started to occur as this steady stream of new products began to emerge from the Sony engineering benches. In the immediate postwar years, Asian countries were seen largely as peddlers of the shoddy, the gimcrack, and the second-rate. But now, with the inventions being shipped eastward by Sony and its like, Japan was swiftly winning quite another reputation, a name for itself such as it had never enjoyed before: for being a past master of the precise, the particular, and the highly accurate. All these devices, at least in the firm’s early days (and this applies to the products of most of the other Japanese firms as well), were made with the kind of precision that was more readily associated with products made in Europe, especially in Switzerland and Germany.
Japan was a society built on traditions born largely of nature: of working in bamboo and water; of tatami and silk; of ceramics and flower arranging and the presentation of tea and the hammering of razor-sharp sweeps of steel; of adapting a natural world that, ipso facto, existed utterly without mathematical perfection, without straight lines. Now, all of a sudden, and thanks to men such as Ibuka, Morita, and Iwama, this country was becoming known for its masters of precision, for its ability to work with germanium and titanium and the pitiless certainties of the micrometer, the caliper, and the vernier scale—and yet never for a moment abandoning its intimacy with nature and the charming, spiritually important imprecisions of the natural world. The dexterity with which the Japanese bridged that gap—to employ and revere both titanium and bamboo, the die-straight and the gently curved—says much about the Pacific Ocean more generally.
For the Pacific had become some kind of cultural meeting place, for a certain kind of marriage—whether permanent or temporary, it was then too early to say, and with details and conclusions to be teased out. It would be a marriage of, on the one hand, a congeries of ancient natural cultures, most of them animist in origin, that permeate and define those countries that make up what the West likes to call the East; and on the other, the more numerically based, more ruthlessly practical capitalist and Judeo-Christian cultures that tend to dominate America, the American West, and what indeed Western peoples more roundly like to call the West.
As far as Sony was concerned, the company seemed first to enjoy and exult in its success, but then later to pay and suffer the often inevitable price of the pioneer. It first rose in public esteem on what seemed an impossibly steep trajectory. It soared with seeming effortlessness through the twentieth century. Its founders died and were honored and memorialized. Akio Morita is widely remembered; Masaru Ibuka, the true creator, rather less so. Then the company began to stutter, to lose velocity and altitude; and it commenced, in the first years of the new century, a long and painfully public decline, with assets sold, management changed, unwise ventures attempted. There came an all-too-regular litany of apologies, meetings dominated by the deep bowing of abject sorrow offered in silence by sad and dignified men who felt they had let everyone down. No excuses, though. No blame attached to others. Just acceptance and endurance, as is the Japanese way.
Sony was hardly alone in its sufferings. The consumer electronics business turned out to be a field of extraordinary competitive brutality. The Japanese companies—Sony, of course, but also Matsushita, Sanyo, Sharp, Toshiba, Panasonic, and a host of others—had at first vanquished the Americans. Their impeccable Japanese-made products and adroit marketing campaigns had reduced firms such as RCA, Magnavox, Zenith, and Sylvania to quivering wrecks, and eventually made them curl up, wither, and perish. The Japanese then assumed lead position and, from the western Pacific, commanded the heights of this new world order.
