![]() ![]() Haggerty understood that scaling up production would drive down the future costs of transistors. So he decided to find an application for germanium transistors that could be produced in volume. Nevertheless, this technology was too expensive for the consumer market, and Haggerty wanted TI to dominate the mass production of transistors before his competitors could catch up. By May 1954, TI surprised its rival licensees by making silicon transistors that worked. Haggerty pushed TI’s engineers to develop transistors made of silicon, rather than germanium, because they could work at higher temperatures and therefore have more applications in the industrial and military markets. TI’s vice president, Pat Haggerty, bet that transistors could be used to miniaturize consumer products and turn his small company into an electronics giant, and joined about two dozen other licensees experimenting with the technology. Early transistors were fragile and difficult to control, and Bell Labs hoped that by licensing the technology at the relatively low cost of $25,000, its quality would improve. Although transistor technology had existed since 1947, the major radio builders continued to produce receivers using vacuum tubes. ![]() Meanwhile, in 1951, Texas Instruments (TI), an instrument maker for the oil industry and the Navy, decided to license the technology for constructing solid-state silicon transistors from Bell Labs. Setting up shop in Indianapolis after World War II, they developed a successful line of signal boosters to improve television reception in rural areas. IDEA (Industrial Development Engineering Associates) was a corporation founded by two former RCA engineers, Joe Weaver and John Pies. The era of portable electronics had begun. On 18 October 1954, in Dallas, Texas Instruments announced the first commercial transistor pocket radio, the Regency TR1, created in collaboration with IDEA Corporation and available in time for the holiday shopping season.
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