World War II prompted research and development of advanced technologies on an unprecedented scale. Atomic and hydrogen bomb research spurred the development of the computer. Other technologies were refined and perfected far faster than would have been possible during peacetime.

These technologies, converted into commercial products after the war, included radar, lasers, plastics, microwaves (discovered by Marconi in 1932) and satellite communications. The most important of these developments, however, was the transistor.

In 1939, William Shockley, a researcher at Bell Labs, wrote in his notebook that he thought it was possible to replace the clunky vacuum tube with semiconductors.On December 23, 1947, Shockley and fellow Bell Lab researchers John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated the perfected the transistor, which did the same job as a vacuum tube, but with a fraction of a tube's space, power and cooling requirements, inaugurating the age of miniaturization.

How important is the transistor? A cell phone built using vacuum tubes would be as big as the Washington Monument.

AT&T licensed transistor technology cheaply to other manufacturers. In 1952, AT&T waived all patent rights for the transistor's use in hearing aids, the first device to use transistors. Then, in 1954, Texas Instruments produced the first transistors made from silicon, which were more powerful than their germanium predecessors. The first transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, appeared that same year. Because of its silicon transistors, the shirt-pocket-sized TR-1 lasted more than 30 hours on a single battery, as opposed to the mere three to five hours of older tube models. Not only was it practical, it was cool. It cost just $49.95 and came in a variety of bright colors.

A year later, a small Japanese company founded by Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka, Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering (Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Ltd.), introduced a smaller model, the TR-55, under its new brand name - Sony Corp.

Sony's success spurred other Japanese companies and, by the end of 1957, three dozen Japanese companies had exported more than 100,000 transistor radios to the United States. Sony was not the only consumer electronics company to rise from the ashes of post-World War II Japan. Before the war, Konosuke Matsushita founded a light socket company that would produce the Panasonic brand and Matsushita would become the world's largest consumer electronics company, a position it still enjoys. In 1959, Ray Gates became the first employee of the Panasonic's U.S. subsidiary. In the course of his 25-year leadership, Gates built Panasonic into the largest American  consumer electronics company. In 1961, William Kasuga co-founded Kenwood Electronics Inc. as a distribution company for Trio Corp., a Japanese consumer electronics manufacturer, and gradually built Kenwood into a name synonymous with quality stereo systems. The company name was changed to Kenwood U.S.A. Corp. in 1975. Recent college graduate Ken Kai came to the U.S. in 1964 and quickly built Pioneer into a household name.

In 1959, the United States imported more than six million radios, half of Japan's total output of transistor radios, which accounted for half of Japan's source of U.S. dollars and the country's fourth largest export. What drove these sales was not necessarily the technology, but rock 'n' roll. The primary buyers of transistor radios were teenagers.