Within a few years of the TR-1 launch, dozens of companies licensed Bell Labs’ transistor patent and began manufacturing a wide array of transistor radios. The museum is also home to a prototype model with a clear case, currently in storage. Adcock, who was actually involved in developing the product at Texas Instruments. The museum’s Regency TR-1, currently on display on the second floor, was donated in 1984 by Dr. “The TR-1 was much more physically robust, with a lot less to break, and it was much, much better on battery life.” “The vacuum tube radios were serious battery hogs, and any vacuum tube generates a certain amount of heat when it operates, and you have to be careful not to drop them,” Wallace says. Although a limited number of portable radios using vacuum tubes had been available, the TR-1 immediately transformed the state of consumer radio technology. It received AM stations and sold for $50, the equivalent of more than $400 today. The Regency TR-1 hit stores on October 18, 1954. “The engineers got a crash program together and developed the necessary transistors and circuits, and they actually managed to get it on the shelves for the Christmas season of 1954.” “In the spring of 1954, they said, ‘Let’s get a program together and try to make a product-not for a couple of years out, but let’s see if we can get it on the shelves for this Christmas season,’” Wallace says. They pushed engineers to develop an alternate material that could function reliably in a small, portable radio. Executives at Texas Instruments, one of the companies licensed the patent from Bell Labs, were highly motivated to get a practical transistor radio to market before the competition. The original transistors had used a substance called germanium as the conducting material, and though it worked well in lab settings, it proved too fragile for everyday use. Although it was initially just used for military applications, engineers and businessmen quickly recognized the potential of the transistor to revolutionize radio receiver technology. It was smaller, consumed less energy and was much more durable. The transistor came to replace the vacuum tube in a wide range of devices. “Not long after the war ended, the transistor was developed at Bell Labs, in 1947.” “There was a tremendous push during the war to reduce the size and power consumption of vacuum tubes,” he says, particularly because the receivers used in radio-controlled bombs depended on vacuum tube technology. The research that led to the transistor replacing the vacuum tube was based on work done during World War II, says Harold Wallace, a curator at the museum. Before the Walkman, the iPod or the iPhone, it all started with the introduction of the first commercial transistor radio, currently on display at the American History Museum. Then, on this day in 1954, the nature of consumer electronics changed forever: listeners could carry around a small device and enjoy their music on the go. Families sat huddled around a wooden appliance, which used a large amount of energy and was too fragile to be carried around because of the breakable vacuum tubes inside. It is a must-have book for anyone interested in Rams' work, his legacy, and his ideas about how to live.For the first 50 years after its invention, the radio was essentially a piece of furniture. It is a clear, comprehensive and beautiful presentation of Dieter Rams' life and his work. In that spirit, this monograph is as little book as possible. Most of all, good design is as little design as possible. Good design is unobtrusive, honest, durable, thorough, and concerned with the environment. Good design should be make a product easily understood. These ideas are summed up in his 'ten principles' of good design: good design is innovative, useful, and aesthetic. He is famous not only for this vast array of well-formed products, but for his remarkably prescient ideas about the correct function of design in the messy, out-of-control world we inhabit today. Even if you don't immediately recognize his name, you have almost certainly used one of the radios, clocks, lighters, juicers, shelves or hundreds of other products he designed. Dieter Rams is one of the most influential product designers of the twentieth century.
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