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Morita was born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1921 the son of sake brewers. In 1946, he helped start Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo KK (the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation) with Ibuka. They had $375 and space in an abandoned department store, shelled by bombs in the war. The company quickly built Japan's first tape recorder, but it was big and bulky -- not a product destined to propel the company into the limelight. Then, in the 1950s, Ibuka and Morita got a license from Bell Labs to build transistors. The Japanese were still hard hit by the war, and couldn't really afford expensive electronics, so Ibuka set his sights on the American market with a brand new idea -- a small, transistorized radio that could fit in your pocket. As it was, a US company built such a radio first, but more as a gimmick than an actual product. When Sony, as Morita's company was soon renamed, came out with their radio, it quickly took over the market While the Regency sold out everywhere, it didn't stay on the market. Texas Instruments caused the sensation it wanted and then moved on to other things. But over in Japan, a tiny company had other ideas. A tape recorder manufacturer called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo had also decided to make small radios. In fact, they were going to devote their whole company to commercial products like that. Tsushin Kogyo was close to manufacturing its first radios when it heard that an American company had beaten them to the punch. But they kept up the hard work, eventually producing a radio they named the TR-52. When Regency quit producing the TR1, in the spring of 1955, the Japanese company was poised to enter the US market. While most American companies researched the transistor for its military applications, Ibuka envisioned using it for communications. While Regency and Texas Instruments in the US may have built a transistor radio first, it was the Tokyo Company that really invested the radio as a viable commercial product. Ibuka's company -- now named Sony, a combination of the Latin word for sound "sonus" and the chic Japanese boys of the time nicknamed "sonny" -- quickly took over the market. The only problem was that the company name was unprouncable for Americans. They needed a new name. Ibuka and his partner Akio Morita thought and thought. First, they found a Latin word sonus meaning, "sound.