How the Regency TR-1 helped Texas Instruments launch its semiconductor business
By Professor Allison Marsh, University of South Carolina
Jeff: Today we feature the incredible story behind the first transistor radio, which has been researched and written by Professor Allison Marsh at the University of South Carolina, and which was first published last year in the journal of the Institute of Electrical Electronics Engineers, to whom we are grateful. Here’s Ray Robinson, in Los Angeles.
Ray: Thanks, Jeff. Imagine if your boss called a meeting in May to announce that he’s committing 10 percent of the company’s revenue to the development of a brand-new mass-market consumer product, made with a not-yet-ready-for-mass production component. Oh, and he wants it on store shelves in less than six months, in time for the holiday shopping season. Ambitious, yes. Kind of nuts, also yes. But that’s pretty much what Pat Haggerty, vice president of Texas Instruments, did in 1954. The result was the Regency TR-1, the world’s first commercial transistor radio, which debuted 70 years ago last October. The engineers delivered on Haggerty’s audacious goal, and manufacturing division and its electronics work. By 1951, Haggerty’s division was significantly outpacing GSI’s geophysical division, and so the Dallas-based company reorganized as Texas Instruments to focus on electronics.
Meanwhile, on 30 June 1948, Bell Labs had announced John Bardeen and Walter Brattain’s game-changing invention of the transistor. No longer would electronics be dependent on large, hot vacuum tubes. The U.S. government chose not to classify the technology because of its potentially broad applications. In 1951, Bell Labs began licensing the transistor for US$25,000 through the Western Electric Co. Haggerty bought a license for TI the following year. TI was still a small company, with not much in the way of R&D capacity. But Haggerty and the other founders wanted it to become a big and profitable company.
And so they established research labs to focus on semiconductor materials and a project-engineering group to develop marketable products. Haggerty also hired Gordon Teal from Bell Labs, who’d been with them for 22 years. Although Teal wasn’t part of the team that invented the germanium transistor, he recognized that it could be improved by using a single grown crystal, such as silicon. Haggerty was familiar with Teal’s work from a 1951 Bell Labs symposium on transistor technology. Teal happened to be homesick for his native Texas, so when TI advertised for a research director in the New York Times, he applied, and Haggerty offered him the job of assistant vice president instead. Teal started at TI
on 1 January 1953.
And 15 months later, Teal demonstrated the first silicon transistor, and he presented his findings 3½ weeks later at the Institute of Radio Engineers’ National Conference on Airborne Electronics, in Dayton, Ohio. The audience was astounded to hear that TI had not just one but three types of silicon transistors already in production.The TR-1 became a product in less than 6 months This advancement in silicon put TI on the map as a major player in the transistor industry, but Haggerty was impatient. He wanted a transistorized commercial product now, even if that meant using germanium transistors. On 21 May 1954, Haggerty challenged a research group at TI to have a working prototype of a transistor radio by the following week; four days later, the team came through, with a breadboard containing eight transistors.
Haggerty decided that was good enough to commit $2 million — just under 10% of TI’s revenue — to commercialize the radio.
Of course, a working prototype is not the same as a mass-production product, and Haggerty knew TI needed a partner to help manufacture the radio. That partner turned out to be Industrial Development Engineering Associates (IDEA), a small company out of Indianapolis that specialized in antenna boosters and other electronic goods. They signed an agreement in June 1954 with the goal of announcing the new radio in October. TI would provide the components, and IDEA would manufacture the radio under its Regency brand.
Germanium transistors at the time cost $10 to $15 apiece. With eight transistors, the radio was too expensive to be marketed at the desired price point of $50 (more than $580 today, which coincidentally is about what it’ll cost you if you can find a good one on eBay). Vacuum-tube radios were selling for less, but TI and IDEA figured early adopters would pay that much to try out a new technology. Part of Haggerty’s strategy was to increase the volume of transistor production to eventually lower the per-transistor cost, which he managed to slash to about $2.50.
By the time TI met with IDEA, the breadboard was down to six transistors. It was IDEA’s challenge to figure out how to make the transistorized radio at a profit. According to Richard Koch, IDEA’s chief engineer on the project, TI’s real goal was to make transistors, and the radio was simply the gimmick to get there. In fact, part of the TI–IDEA agreement was that any patents that came out of the project would be in the public domain so that TI was free to sell more transistors to other buyers.
At the initial meeting, Koch, who had never seen a transistor before in real life, suggested substituting a germanium diode for the detector (which extracted the audio signal from the desired radio frequency), bringing the transistor count down to five. After thinking about the configuration a bit more, Koch
eliminated another transistor by using a single transistor for the oscillator/mixer circuit. The final design was four transistors set in a superheterodyne design, a type of receiver that combines two frequencies to produce an intermediate frequency that can easily be amplified, thereby boosting a weak signal and decreasing the required antenna size. The TR-1 had two transistors as intermediate-frequency amplifiers and one as an audio amplifier, plus the oscillator/mixer. Koch applied for a patent
for the circuitry the following year. The radio ran on a 22.5-volt battery, which offered a playing life of 20 to 30 hours and cost $1.25. (Such batteries were also used in external power packs for hearing aids, the only other consumer product to use transistors up to that point.)
TI’s original prototype
While IDEA’s team was working on the circuitry, they outsourced the design of the TR-1’s packaging to the Chicago firm of Painter, Teague, and Petertil. Their first design didn’t work because the components didn’t fit. Would their second design be better? As Koch later recalled, IDEA’s purchasing agent, Floyd Hayhurst, picked up the molding dies for the radio cases in Chicago and rushed them back to Indianapolis. He arrived at 2:00 in the morning, and the team got to work. Fortunately, everything fit this time. The plastic case was a little warped, but that was simple to fix: they slapped a wooden piece on each case as it came off the line so it wouldn’t twist as it cooled.
How each radio was assembled by hand: https://youtu.be/kKln6zTy4C8 On 18 October 1954, Texas Instruments announced the first commercial transistorized radio. It would be available in select outlets in New York and Los Angeles beginning 1 November, with wider distribution once production ramped up. The Regency TR-1 Transistor Pocket Radio initially came in black, gray, red, and ivory, priced $49.95. Other colors were added later: green, mahogany, lavender, pearl white, meridian blue, powder pink, and lime.
The TR-1 got so-so reviews, faced competition Consumer Reports was not enthusiastic about the Regency TR-1. In its April 1955 review, it found that transmission of speech was “adequate” under good conditions, but music transmission was unsatisfactory under any conditions, especially on a noisy street or crowded beach. The magazine used adjectives such as whistle, squeal, thin, tinny, and high-pitched to describe various sounds — not exactly high praise for a radio. It also found fault with the on/off switch. Their recommendation: wait for further refinement before buying one. The engineers at TI and IDEA didn’t necessarily disagree. They knew they were making a sound-quality trade-off by going with just four transistors. They also had quality-control problems with the transistors and other components, with initial failure rates up to 50 percent. Eventually, IDEA got the failure rate down to 12 to 15 percent.
Unbeknownst to TI or IDEA, Raytheon was also working on a transistorized radio — a tabletop model rather than a pocket-sized one. That gave them the space to use six transistors, which significantly upped the sound quality. Raytheon’s radio came out in February 1955. Priced at $79.95, it weighed 4½ pounds and ran on four D-cell batteries. That August, a small Japanese company called Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corp. released its first transistor radio, the TR-55. A few years later, the company changed its name to Sony and went on to dominate the world’s consumer radio market.
The legacy of the Regency TR-1
The Regency TR-1 was a success by many measures: it sold 100,000 units in its first year, and it helped jump-start the transistor market. But the radio was never very profitable. Within a few years, both Texas Instruments and IDEA left the commercial AM radio business; TI to focus on semiconductors, and IDEA to concentrate on citizens band radios. Yet Pat Haggerty estimated that this little pocket radio pushed the market in transistorized consumer goods ahead by two years. It was a leap of faith that worked out, thanks to some hard-working engineers with a vision.
Back to you, Jeff.
(Ray Robinson/AWR Wavescan)
YouTube Video - Assembling Transistor Radios 1955
