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 this month. The engineers delivered on Haggerty’s audacious goal, and I certainly hope they received a substantial year-end bonus.

Why did Texas Instruments make the Regency TR-1 transistor radio?

But how did Texas Instruments come to make a transistor radio in the first place? TI traces its roots to a company called Geophysical Service Inc. (GSI), which made seismic instrumentation for the oil industry as well as electronics for the military. In 1945, GSI hired Patrick E. Haggerty as the general manager of its laboratory 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 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.

The engineers delivered on Haggerty’s audacious goal, and I certainly hope they received a substantial year-end bonus.

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.

The TR-1 was the first transistor radio, and it ignited a desire for portable gadgets that continues to this day. Bettmann/Getty Images

Haggerty made a good investment when he hired Gordon Teal, a 22-year veteran of Bell Labs. 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.

Fifteen months later, Teal gave Haggerty a demonstration of the first silicon transistor, and he presented his findings three and a half weeks later at the Institute of Radio Engineers’ National Conference on Airborne Electronics, in Dayton, Ohio. His innocuously titled paper, “Some Recent Developments in Silicon and Germanium Materials and Devices,” completely understated the magnitude of the announcement. The audience was astounded to hear that TI had not just one but three types of silicon transistors already in production, as Michael Riordan recounts in his excellent article “The Lost History of the Transistor” (IEEE Spectrum, October 2004).

And fun fact: The TR-1 shown at top once belonged to Willis Adcock, a physical chemist hired by Teal to perfect TI’s silicon transistors as well as transistors for the TR-1. (The radio is now in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.)

The TR-1 became a product in less than six 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 percent of TI’s revenue—to commercializing 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 is coincidentally about what it’ll cost you to buy one in good condition 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 push down 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 an oral history with 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.

TI’s original prototype used eight germanium transistors, which engineers reduced to six and, ultimately, four for the production model.Division of Work and Industry/National Museum of American History/Smithsonian Institution

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 be easily 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 about $1.25. (Such batteries were also used in the external power and electronics pack for hearing aids, the only other consumer product to use transistors up until this point.)

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.

This video shows how each radio was assembled by hand:

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. They later added green and mahogany, as well as a run of pearlescents and translucents: 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.

More than 100,000 TR-1s were sold in its first year, but the radio was never very profitable.Archive PL/Alamy

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-size 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 2 kilograms 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 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 hardworking engineers with a vision.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the October 2024 print issue as “The First Transistor Radio.”

References

In 1984, Michael Wolff conducted oral histories with IDEA’s lead engineer Richard Koch and purchasing agent Floyd Hayhurst. Wolff subsequently used them the following year in his IEEE Spectrum article “The Secret Six-Month Project,” which includes some great references at the end.

Robert J. Simcoe wrote “The Revolution in Your Pocket” for the fall 2004 issue of Invention and Technology to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Regency TR-1.

As with many collectibles, the Regency TR-1 has its champions who have gathered together many primary sources. For example, Steve Reyer, a professor of electrical engineering at the Milwaukee School of Engineering before he passed away in 2018, organized his efforts in a webpage that’s now hosted by https://www.collectornet.net.

The Media Archaeology Lab is one of the largest public collections in the world of obsolete, yet functional, technology. Located on the University of Colorado Boulder campus, the MAL is where you can watch a magic lantern show, play Star Castle on a Vectrex games console, or check out the weather on an Atari 800 via Fujinet. IEEE Spectrum spoke to managing director Libi Rose Striegl about the MAL’s mission and her role in keeping all that obsolete tech functional, so that people of today can experience the media of the past.

​Libi Rose

Libi Rose Striegl is the managing director for the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder.

How is the MAL different from other collections of historical and vintage technology?

Libi Rose: Our major difference is that we treat ourselves as a lab and an experimental space for hands-on use, as opposed to a museum-type collection. We’re very much focused on the humanistic side of computer use. We’re interested in unexpected juxtapositions of technologies and ways that we can get people of all ages and all backgrounds to use these things, in either the expected ways or in unexpected ways.

What’s your role at the lab?

Rose: I do all the day-to-day admin work, managing our volunteer group, working with professors on campus to do course integration. Doing off-site events, doing repair work myself or coordinating it. [Recording a new addition] myself or coordinating it. Coordinating donations. Social-media accounts. Kind of a whole crew of people’s worth of work in one job! My office is also the repair space.

“We’re very much focused on the humanistic side of computer use.”

What’s the hardest part about keeping old systems running?

Rose: We don’t have a huge amount of trouble with old computer systems other than not having time. It’s other things that are hard to keep running. Our older things, our mechanical things, the information is gone. The people who did that work in the past have passed away. And so we’re kind of re-creating the wheel when we want to do something like repair a mechanical calculator, or figure out how to make a phonograph that stopped working start working again. For newer stuff, the hardest part of a lot of it is that the hardware itself exists, but maybe server-side infrastructure is [gone]. So older cellphones are very hard to work with, because while we can turn them on, we can’t do much else with them unless you start getting into building your own analog cell network, which we’ve talked about. Missing infrastructure is why we end up doing a lot of things. We run our little analog TV station in-house.

An analog TV station?

Rose: Yes, otherwise you can’t really see what broadcast TV would have looked like on those old analog televisions!

How do visitors respond?

Rose: It sort of depends on age and familiarity with things. Young kids are often brought in by their parents to be introduced to stuff. And my favorite reactions are from 7- and 8-year-olds who are like, “Oh, my God. I’m so sorry for you old people who had to do this.” College-age students have either their own nostalgia or sort of residual nostalgia from their parents or grandparents. They’re really interested in interacting with something that they saw on television or that their parents told them about. Older folks tend to jump right onto the nostalgia train. We get a lot of good conversation around that and where technology goes when it dies, what that all means.

This article appears in the October 2024 print issues as “5 Questions for Libi Rose.”

Few devices are as crucial to people’s everyday lives as their household appliances. Electrical engineer Erika Cruz says it’s her mission to make sure they operate smoothly.

Cruz helps design washing machines and dryers for Whirlpool, the multinational appliance manufacturer.

Erika Cruz

Employer:

Whirlpool

Occupation:

Associate electrical engineer

Education:

Bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering, Industrial University of Santander, in Bucaramanga, Colombia

As a member of the electromechanical components team at Whirlpool’s research and engineering center in Benton Harbor, Mich., she oversees the development of timers, lid locks, humidity sensors, and other components.

More engineering goes into the machines than is obvious. Because the appliances are sold around the world, she says, they must comply with different technical and safety standards and environmental conditions. And reliability is key.

“If the washer’s door lock gets stuck and your clothes are inside, your whole day is going to be a mess,” she says.

While appliances can be taken for granted, Cruz loves that her work contributes in its own small way to the quality of life of so many.

“I love knowing that every time I’m working on a new design, the lives of millions of people will be improved by using it,” she says.

From Industrial Design to Electrical Engineering

Cruz grew up in Bucaramanga, Colombia, where her father worked as an electrical engineer, designing control systems for poultry processing plants. Her childhood home was full of electronics, and Cruz says her father taught her about technology. He paid her to organize his resistors, for example, and asked her to create short videos for work presentations about items he was designing. He also took Cruz and her sister along with him to the processing plants.

“We would go and see how the big machines worked,” she says. “It was very impressive because of their complexity and impact. That’s how I got interested in technology.”

In 2010, Cruz enrolled in Colombia’s Industrial University of Santander, in Bucaramanga, to study industrial design. But she quickly became disenchanted with the course’s focus on designing objects like fancy tables and ergonomic chairs.

“I wanted to design huge machines like my father did,” she says.

A teacher suggested that she study mechanical engineering instead. But her father was concerned about discrimination she might face in that career.

“He told me it would be difficult to get a job in the industry because mechanical engineers work with heavy machinery, and they saw women as being fragile,” Cruz says.

Her father thought electrical engineers would be more receptive to women, so she switched fields.

“I am very glad I ended up studying electronics because you can apply it to so many different fields,” Cruz says. She received a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering in 2019.

The Road to America

While at university, Cruz signed up for a program that allowed Colombian students to work summer jobs in the United States. She held a variety of summer positions in Galveston, Texas, from 2017 to 2019, including cashier, housekeeper, and hostess.

She met her future husband in 2018, an American working at the same amusement park as she did. When she returned the following summer, they started dating, and that September they married. Since she had already received her degree, he was eager for her to move to the states permanently, but she made the difficult decision to return to Colombia.

“With the language barrier and my lack of engineering experience, I knew if I stayed in the United States, I would have to continue working jobs like housekeeping forever,” she says. “So I told my husband he had to wait for me because I was going back home to get some engineering experience.”

“I love knowing that every time I’m working on a new design, the lives of millions of people will be improved by using it.”

Cruz applied for engineering jobs in neighboring Brazil, which had more opportunities than Colombia did. In 2021, she joined Whirlpool as an electrical engineer at its R&D site in Joinville, Brazil. There, she introduced into mass production sensors and actuators provided by new suppliers.

Meanwhile, she applied for a U.S. Green Card, which would allow her to work and live permanently in the country. She received it six months after starting her job. Cruz asked her manager about transferring to one of Whirlpool’s U.S. facilities, not expecting to have any luck. Her manager set up a phone call with the manager of the components team at the company’s Benton Harbor site to discuss the request. Cruz didn’t realize that the call was actually a job interview. She was offered a position there as an electrical engineer and moved to Michigan later that year.

Designing Appliances Is Complex

Designing a new washing machine or dryer is a complex process, Cruz says. First, feedback from customers about desirable features is used to develop a high-level design. Then the product design work is divided among small teams of engineers, each responsible for a given subsystem, including hardware, software, materials, and components.

Part of Cruz’s job is to test components from different suppliers to make sure they meet safety, reliability, and performance requirements. She also writes the documentation that explains to other engineers about the components’ function and design.

Cruz then helps select the groups of components to be used in a particular application—combining, say, three temperature sensors with two humidity sensors in an optimized location to create a system that finds the best time to stop the dryer.

Building a Supportive Environment

Cruz loves her job, but her father’s fears about her entering a male-dominated field weren’t unfounded. Discrimination was worse in Colombia, she says, where she regularly experienced inappropriate comments and behavior from university classmates and teachers.

Even in the United States, she points out, “As a female engineer, you have to actually show you are able to do your job, because occasionally at the beginning of a project men are not convinced.”

In both Brazil and Michigan, Cruz says, she’s been fortunate to often end up on teams with a majority of women, who created a supportive environment. That support was particularly important when she had her first child and struggled to balance work and home life.

“It’s easier to talk to women about these struggles,” she says. “They know how it feels because they have been through it too.”

Update Your Knowledge

Working in the consumer electronics industry is rewarding, Cruz says. She loves going into a store or visiting someone’s home and seeing the machines that she’s helped build in action.

A degree in electronics engineering is a must for the field, Cruz says, but she’s also a big advocate of developing project management and critical thinking skills. She is a certified associate in project management, granted by the Project Management Institute, and has been trained in using tools that facilitate critical thinking. She says the project management program taught her how to solve problems in a more systematic way and helped her stand out in interviews.

It’s also important to constantly update your knowledge, Cruz says, “because electronics is a discipline that doesn’t stand still. Keep learning. Electronics is a science that is constantly growing.”

This sponsored article is brought to you by Purdue University.

The CHIPS America Act was a response to a worsening shortfall in engineers equipped to meet the growing demand for advanced electronic devices. That need persists. In its 2023 policy report, Chipping Away: Assessing and Addressing the Labor Market Gap Facing the U.S. Semiconductor Industry, the Semiconductor Industry Association forecast a demand for 69,000 microelectronic and semiconductor engineers between 2023 and 2030—including 28,900 new positions created by industry expansion and 40,100 openings to replace engineers who retire or leave the field.

This number does not include another 34,500 computer scientists (13,200 new jobs, 21,300 replacements), nor does it count jobs in other industries that require advanced or custom-designed semiconductors for controls, automation, communication, product design, and the emerging systems-of-systems technology ecosystem.

Purdue University is taking charge, leading semiconductor technology and workforce development in the U.S. As early as Spring 2022, Purdue University became the first top engineering school to offer an online Master’s Degree in Microelectronics and Semiconductors.

U.S. News & World Report has ranked the university’s graduate engineering program among America’s 10 best every year since 2012 (and among the top 4 since 2022)

“The degree was developed as part of Purdue’s overall semiconductor degrees program,” says Purdue Prof. Vijay Raghunathan, one of the architects of the semiconductor program. “It was what I would describe as the nation’s most ambitious semiconductor workforce development effort.”

Prof. Vijay Raghunathan, one of the architects of the online Master’s Degree in Microelectronics and Semiconductors at Purdue.Purdue University

Purdue built and announced its bold high-technology online program while the U.S. Congress was still debating the $53 billion “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America Act” (CHIPS America Act), which would be passed in July 2022 and signed into law in August.

Today, the online Master’s in Microelectronics and Semiconductors is well underway. Students learn leading-edge equipment and software and prepare to meet the challenges they will face in a rejuvenated, and critical, U.S. semiconductor industry.

Is the drive for semiconductor education succeeding?

“I think we have conclusively established that the answer is a resounding ‘Yes,’” says Raghunathan. Like understanding big data, or being able to program, “the ability to understand how semiconductors and semiconductor-based systems work, even at a rudimentary level, is something that everybody should know. Virtually any product you design or make is going to have chips inside it. You need to understand how they work, what the significance is, and what the risks are.”

Earning a Master’s in Microelectronics and Semiconductors

Students pursuing the Master’s Degree in Microelectronics and Semiconductors will take courses in circuit design, devices and engineering, systems design, and supply chain management offered by several schools in the university, such as Purdue’s Mitch Daniels School of Business, the Purdue Polytechnic Institute, the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the School of Materials Engineering, among others.

Professionals can also take one-credit-hour courses, which are intended to help students build “breadth at the edges,” a notion that grew out of feedback from employers: Tomorrow’s engineering leaders will need broad knowledge to connect with other specialties in the increasingly interdisciplinary world of artificial intelligence, robotics, and the Internet of Things.

“This was something that we embarked on as an experiment 5 or 6 years ago,” says Raghunathan of the one-credit courses. “I think, in hindsight, that it’s turned out spectacularly.”

A researcher adjusts imaging equipment in a lab in Birck Nanotechnology Center, home to Purdue’s advanced research and development on semiconductors and other technology at the atomic scale.Rebecca Robiños/Purdue University

The Semiconductor Engineering Education Leader

Purdue, which opened its first classes in 1874, is today an acknowledged leader in engineering education. U.S. News & World Report has ranked the university’s graduate engineering program among America’s 10 best every year since 2012 (and among the top 4 since 2022). And Purdue’s online graduate engineering program has ranked in the country’s top three since the publication started evaluating online grad programs in 2020. (Purdue has offered distance Master’s degrees since the 1980s. Back then, of course, course lectures were videotaped and mailed to students. With the growth of the web, “distance” became “online,” and the program has swelled.)

Thus, Microelectronics and Semiconductors Master’s Degree candidates can study online or on-campus. Both tracks take the same courses from the same instructors and earn the same degree. There are no footnotes, asterisks, or parentheses on the diploma to denote online or in-person study.

“If you look at our program, it will become clear why Purdue is increasingly considered America’s leading semiconductors university” —Prof. Vijay Raghunathan, Purdue University

Students take classes at their own pace, using an integrated suite of proven online-learning applications for attending lectures, submitting homework, taking tests, and communicating with faculty and one another. Texts may be purchased or downloaded from the school library. And there is frequent use of modeling and analytical tools like Matlab. In addition, Purdue is also the home of national the national design-computing resources nanoHUB.org (with hundreds of modeling, simulation, teaching, and software-development tools) and its offspring, chipshub.org (specializing in tools for chip design and fabrication).

From R&D to Workforce and Economic Development

“If you look at our program, it will become clear why Purdue is increasingly considered America’s leading semiconductors university, because this is such a strategic priority for the entire university, from our President all the way down,” Prof. Raghunathan sums up. “We have a task force that reports directly to the President, a task force focused only on semiconductors and microelectronics. On all aspects—R&D, the innovation pipeline, workforce development, economic development to bring companies to the state. We’re all in as far as chips are concerned.”