In 1945, in the devastated centre of Tokyo, he founded the Tokyo Tsushin Kenkyusho (the Tokyo Communications Laboratory). When the war ended, Ibuka decided to concentrate on consumer products. In 1940 the vacuum tube department became independent and Ibuka joined the Japan Measurement Instrument Company, where he developed military technology, such as submarine detection instruments. In 1936 he moved to the Japan Opto-acoustic Engineering Company, where he worked on vacuum tubes. Pursuing that interest into higher education, in 1933 Ibuka graduated in electrical engineering from Waseda University.Īfter graduation, Ibuka joined the Photochemical Laboratory, where he worked on sound and picture recording technologies. For example, it is said that he frequently took alarm clocks to pieces, and when he could not fit them together again his grandfather would buy him a new one to start again. After his mother's remarriage, Ibuka stayed with his grandparents and was indulged in his fascination with technology and science. In 1910, following his father's tragic accidental death by electrocution, Ibuka moved with his mother to live with his paternal grandparents in Kobe. His was a technologically aware family - his father had studied electrochemistry at the school which has now become the famous Tokyo Institute of Technology, and as a young man he constructed one of Japan's first water-driven electrical power stations. Ibuka was born on 11 April 1908, in the beautiful town of Nikko in Tochigi Prefecture, about 100 km north of Tokyo.

Ibuka died on 19 December 1997, almost 50 years to the day after that announcement from Bell Labs and the debut of the invention which he was to help develop so far. In Japan, two such engineers and entrepreneurs were the co-founders of SONY, Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka. Equally importantly, visionary engineers and entrepreneurs had to recognize the significance of the invention before its time had really come, and attract, organize and inspire the right people to build popular and profitable products, initially using very limited resources. These and other technical problems had to be surmounted before the transistor could fulfil its immense potential.

But the device was neither ready for production on industrial scales, nor could it operate at high enough frequencies for most applications. On 16 December 1947 a group of scientists at Bell Laboratories in the United States, including the eventual Nobel laureates John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain, announced that they had developed the transistor.

Isrura ibuka sony transistor radio