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https://spectrum.ieee.org/transistor-radio-invented
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.
[...] 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 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.
(Score: 5, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday October 08, @02:59PM (1 child)
TFA leads to . . .
This video shows how each radio was assembled by hand [youtube.com]
Electrical wiring literally printed on boards!
Santa maintains a database and does double verification of it.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 08, @11:21PM
> If you don't like grocery prices now, wait until Trump deports the 'lazy' people who pick it, process it and package it.
I used to work in a food processing and packaging factory in the USA. Most of the workers were from Mexico and other countries south of the US. We technicians observed and proved that many (most) of them did not wash their hands after using the bathroom, including doing #2. Sometimes they didn't bother to flush the toilet, and sometimes within that scenario there was no toilet paper having been used.