The Sony Corporation was founded by engineers Masru Ibuka and Morita Akio in 1946 as the ‘Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation’ and initially operated as small repair centre for war-damaged radios and sets. With a mission to ‘do what has never been done before,’ Sony were responsible for launching the consumer micro-electronics industry and in 1957 produced the world’s smallest transistor radio, the TR-63 pocket-sized radio. In 1952, Sony’s founders made the decision to licence the transistor, an exciting new semi-conductor device owned by the American company, Western Electric. This led to the development of Sony’s first hugely successful product line of portable transistor radios. Although the portable radio had already been realised by the American manufacturers Idea Inc. and Texas Instruments in 1954, Sony’s version, the TR-55, launched in 1955 was more commercially successful due to its inexpensive, compact design. Where once the radio was a centrepiece around which people would congregate and socialise, the transistor radio provided a new sense of freedom for listeners, offering both privacy and portability to its users.

The TR-620 is an evolution of the Sony TR-610, an object already part of the museum’s collection. It was the last transistor radio with a speaker marketed as a shirt-pocket radio. By the mid-1960s, Sony engineers further reduced the radio’s size by eliminating the speaker to create an earphone-only device, which also allowed for the use of cheaper transistors. The TR-620 is viewed as the radio that challenged the British radio manufacturing industry. In 1959, only 3% of radios in Britain came from overseas, however, by 1963, this had risen to 36%.