On October 18, 1954, Texas Instruments and a small company called Industrial Development Engineering Associates announced the Regency TR-1, the first radio to reach the public with transistors instead of vacuum tubes, and it went on sale in time for Christmas at a price of 49.95 dollars. The set was small. It could be carried in one hand. Radios up to that point had to be plugged in or run from heavy batteries.
The transistors came from Texas Instruments, which had begun work on silicon devices and had a small production line. The design work was done by the smaller firm in Indianapolis, which had made parts for hearing aids, and the two companies shared the risk. The set used four transistors and had a plastic case in several colours. Its performance was not as good as a table radio, and the battery was short lived, but it worked, and it was the first of its kind on sale.
About 100,000 were sold, which was not a large number by the standards of the radio trade, and the price was high for the time. The sales were modest. The importance lay in the direction it pointed. Within a few years Japanese firms, above all Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, later Sony, built transistor radios in very large numbers and sold them around the world, and the small set became a common object in homes, cars and on beaches, and the tubes that had ruled radio and television began to be pushed out.
The change reached far beyond radio. The transistor had been invented at Bell Labs in 1947, and the arrival of a cheap consumer product built around it showed that solid state devices could be made by the million and sold at a profit, which encouraged the investment that led on to the integrated circuit and the computer industry. The market followed. The Regency TR-1 is kept in museum collections as the first transistor radio.