The market was well-supplied with vacuum tube radios, and there would have been no point in simply duplicating what they could do. Transistor radios could of course be portable, but this would mean adapting many other parts and employing printed circuit boards. Ibuka and his team were to have many headaches before they were through.
Portable battery-powered radios which used vacuum tubes already existed, though they were on the large side. Ibuka's team went around to individual component manufacturers and persuaded them to make parts smaller. For exampl
e, Mitsumi Denki made the small variable condensers used in battery-operated vacuum tube radios.
Ibuka requested a smaller component with a good performance. For small speakers they went to Foster. While they were thus occupied, the Totsuko people heard discouraging news. The world's first transistor radio had gone on the market in the U.S. In December 1954 - just in time for the Christmas season - an American company called Regency had brought out a commercial super-receiver, model TR-1, that used four transistors and had an output of 10mW.
Totsuko had tried hard to be first. "If only MITI had issued our permit a little sooner..." thought Ibuka. But Totsuko was also spurred on by this setback to work even harder on developing their own transistors and circuits. In January 1955 Totusko's labors reached fruition. A Totsuko transistor radio produced sound. They had succeeded in building the TR-52 super-receive
r prototype using five junction transistors.
Morita was planning a trip to the U.S. and Canada in March of that year to conduct market surveys and business discussions. He was to take the new radio as a sample. Before he left on this second trip to North America, they decided to label all Totsuko products with the Sony brand name. As Ibuka, Morita, Iwama and Higuchi visited the U.S. with increasing frequency, one subject kept coming up. Americans could not pronounce either Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo or Totsuko. It was no use pushing a product with an unpronounceable
name. The problem had bothered them for some time, and if they were going to change their company name they wanted to be sure they made the right choice. They wanted a simple name that was easy to read, remember and pronounce in any language.
A two-letter name would be the simplest, but in the Romanized alphabet this was next to impossible. Three letters then. But there were many three-letter company names already, such as RCA, NBC, CBS and NHK. This could become confusing. They thought of taking the initials of Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo and calling themselves TTK, but that was too similar to the TKK adopted by railway companyTokyo Kyuko. That left the possibility of using four letters, and here they tried all sorts of combinations. The crux of the problem was pronounceability. When Ibuka went to the U.S. he was called "I-byu-ka." The makers of Nikon cameras were known to most Americans as "Nigh-kon." Americans visiting Japan would ask in vain for "Nigh-kons," whereas in Japan there were nothing but "Nee-kons."
"Sony" was the name they arrived at by this process. It crossed the Latin word sonus, from which "sound" and "sonic" are derived, with the English diminutive "sonny,v suggesting, they hoped, a fledgling company o
f young people who made up for in energy what they lacked in size.
So now they had their trade name. Morita went to the U.S. in high spirits, carrying his Sony products.
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