17) Sony who was Particular about Consumer Application

 
Photo A: The report which was sent from Iwama studying at WE company (Enlargeable)


Photo B: Point contact transistor made by WE


Photo C: Point contact transistor made by Sony

It was Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (now Sony) who made an early entry to semiconductor business, as early as Kobe Kogyo. The company is said to be the very first of the post-war ventures in Japan. Partly because the company had its past history that the president, Masaru Ibuka had been engaged in the military related technology development during the war, it was particular about consumer applications of the transistors, especially about the radio applications.
The negotiation with WE, which was the manufacturing arm of Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL) and took charge of transistor patent control, was smoothly closed with $25,000 contract fee.
However, when Ibuka told his plan to use it for radio application, they commented bluntly that they would never recommend this idea because of the difficulty of high frequency performance issue, and that hearing aid would be the best they could realize.
But Ibuka persisted in his own thought, "We will do what nobody else does," and it was realized indeed.
Kazuo Iwama who was a director of the Board and in charge of R&D of the company (later the president) went to WE for the training. He stayed mainly at Allentown factory in New Jersey for approximately 20 days. He faced at a problem that WE would not allow him to take any notes, nor sketches on the sites. He then made reports as shown in Photo A which covered all the necessary details by reaching back into his memory in his hotel room, and sent them back to the company. The number of the reports reached well over 30. It means that the development team in Tokyo received more than one report every other day.
Surprisingly, the development team in Tokyo completed the sample preparation of both point-contact and junction transistors, even before Iwama returned, based on only the three volume BTL text books of "Transistor Technology" and "Iwama Report." You can tell how much practical and how much in full of the details these reports were.
By this success, Sony took the plunge to the external sales of transistors in July 1954.
Photo (C) shows a point contact transistor made by Sony, in comparison to the one by WE in Photo (B). These two are similar as like as two pears indeed.
(By courtesy of Sony(Photo:A)and Nishizawa(Photo B&C))

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“Mr. Shimura’s Essays with Historic Photos”    Semiconductor History Museum of Japan
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