U. S. Radio (Oct 1957-Dec 1958)

David Leads Goliath «*r. The tiny transistor has surged to the forefront f of the giant radio manufacturing industry. With transistors topping shopp^i^ ti^ts, nearly 30 million radios have been sold in the last two years — an all-time record. The biggest thing in the electronics industry today is an object ". . . about the size of a kernel of corn" or ". . . smaller than a pea." This mighty smidgeon, which has exploded in the midst of the electronics field like a miniature Hbomb, is of course the much-talkedabout transistor. Its impact on the radio set manufacturing industry, and by extension on the entire field of radio broadcasting, has been truly phenomenal. Transistor radios are being snapped up by a clamorous public faster than production lines can turn them out. One manufacturer, Zenith, has hundreds of back orders stacked up, sales manager John Andrus says. Other manufacturers leport a similarly pleasant state of affairs. In 1956 a total of 702,000 transistor sets were sold, according to the authoritative Electronics Industries Association. In the first seven months of 1957, 1,289,400 transistor radios were sold — and the biggest selling months, preceding the gift season, are yet to come. The tiny, powerful, attractively styled radios have caught the public fancy like no comparable product in a long time. In 1956, according to EI A, 18% of all radios bought were transistors. Thus far in 1957 the figure has shot up to 37%. The gold-rush aspect of the transistor story is only part of the whole radio set sales picture. The set manufacturers never had it so good. The story, in fact, is making national headlines even in the daily papers. The Associated Press reported recently: "Nearly 30,000,000 radio receivers have been sold in the past two years, twice the number of television sets sold." The inferences are obvious. More sets being sold— more sets in usemore listeners — more sales opportunities for radio advertisers. Design Engineers Set Pace In their valiant effort to keep up with the demand for sets, the radio manufacturers are tooling production lines for maximuin output, and design engineers are working at full throttle on new models and new styling. Virtually every day one manufacturer or another hits the market with a new radio set. The design engineers, their imagination given free rein, are meeting the challenge with stunningly handsome cabinets and with radios in every conceivable form and combination. The transistor radio, however, is the glamor boy of the industry and appears likely to remain so. To say that it's the cat's whiskers would be accurate in more ways than one. Readers past 30 will recall the crystal-set radio of the Twenties, with its "cat's whisker" crystal detector and earphones. The cat's whisker of that era was a simple device for converting an alternating ciurent into a direct current. (The crystal detector was a mechanism used as early as the 1900's for detecting radio signals.) The first transistor, announced by Bell Laboratories in 1948, went it one better: it had two "cat's whiskers," or wire contacts to the crystal, instead of one. The transistor itself, as used in today's pocket size radio sets, consists simply of a small crystal of germanium metal imbedded in a plastic shell. This shell — the size of a pea or a kernel of corn — and what it contains is an effective substitute for an eight-inch vaciumi tube. Fortunately only the tiniest bit of oermanium is needed to make a o transistor. The cost of pure germanium is roughly that of an equal amount of raw gold. This is due to the complexity of the refining process — germanium, a basic element once considered worthless, is purified for transistor production until there is no more than one foreign atom to each 100 million germanium atoms. This is crystalized and sliced into small pellets or wafers. U.S. RADIO • October 1957 25