On October 18, 1954, Texas Instruments and the Regency Division of I.D.E.A. announced the Regency TR-1, the first transistor radio ever offered for sale to the public. Priced at $49.95, about $590 today, it went on sale in select stores in New York and Los Angeles that November, with wider distribution following soon after.
The TR-1 packed just four transistors into a pocket-sized case, and by the standards of the vacuum-tube radios it was replacing, the sound quality was genuinely bad, tinny and thin, and reviewers at the time said so. But none of that mattered much, because the TR-1 wasn’t really selling great audio. It was selling portability and novelty: a radio you could carry in your jacket pocket instead of hauling around a tube set the size of a toaster. It sold briskly, with estimates ranging from roughly 100,000 to 150,000 units in its first year or so on the market.
The TR-1’s real legacy is the industry it kicked off. Texas Instruments’ bet on transistors for a consumer product helped prove that solid-state electronics could be miniaturized and mass-produced cheaply, a lesson that fed directly into the transistorized computers, calculators, and eventually integrated circuits that followed over the next two decades.
Also notable on this day: on October 18, 1967, the Soviet probe Venera 4 reached Venus, becoming the first spacecraft to directly measure the atmosphere of another planet.
Source: Wikipedia: Regency TR-1, Electronics Notes: Regency TR-1
Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.
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