The Rice Cooker That Failed

The rice went into a wooden tub. At the bottom of the tub were two strips of aluminium, wired to the mains. When the current was switched on, it passed through the wet rice and water and heated them.

The idea was clever. As the water boiled away, the current would stop by itself, and the rice would be done.

In practice, it almost never was. Depending on the rice and the water, it came out half raw or soft and mushy. The engineers who had built it, in a damaged department store in the middle of a ruined city, tried again and again. The rice cooker never became a product.

A city in ashes

It was the autumn of 1945. The Second World War had just ended. Much of Tokyo had been destroyed by bombing and fire. Food was scarce, homes were gone, and millions of people were trying to work out how to live.

Masaru Ibuka was an engineer in his late thirties. During the war he had run a company that made electronic instruments. Now, with a handful of the people who had worked with him, he came back to Tokyo and rented a small space in the Shirokiya department store in Nihonbashi, a building that had itself been damaged in the raids.

He called it the Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute. The name was much bigger than the room.

Radios and rice

They did whatever work they could find. During the war, many radios in Japan had been changed so that they could not pick up shortwave broadcasts from abroad. Ibuka's team repaired radios and built small adapters so that people could hear the outside world again.

They also tried to invent things that a hungry, broken city might need, and the electric rice cooker was one of them. It failed. So did other early ideas. But the radio work was good, and people heard about it.

A newspaper column mentioned the little workshop in the department store. A young man named Akio Morita read it.

Two partners

Morita and Ibuka had met during the war, when both worked on a navy research committee. Morita was much younger, in his mid-twenties, a physicist with a quick mind and a gift for talking to people. Ibuka was the inventor, happiest at a workbench.

Morita wrote to Ibuka and then went to see him. They decided to build a company together.

There was a difficulty. Morita was the eldest son of a family that had brewed sake near Nagoya for many generations. He was expected to take over the family business. He went home and talked to his father, with Ibuka beside him. His father agreed to let him go, and later even helped the new company with money.

On 7 May 1946, they founded Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. It had around twenty people and very little money. Ibuka wrote a founding statement describing the company he hoped for: a free and open place where engineers could enjoy their work and make things that would be useful to ordinary people.

A leaking roof

The company soon moved to an old wooden building on a hill in Shinagawa. In his memoir, Morita remembered that the roof leaked so badly that people sometimes worked under umbrellas when it rained.

Their first big product was a tape recorder, finished in 1950. It worked, but it was enormous, heavy and expensive, and at first almost nobody wanted to buy one. People did not know what they would use it for. The partners learned a hard lesson: inventing something was only half the work. They also had to understand who needed it, and why.

They made smaller and cheaper machines. They found customers in schools, which used the recorders for teaching. Slowly, the company found its feet.

The small radio

In the early 1950s, the American company Western Electric was offering licences for a new invention, the transistor, which could replace large, hot valves in radios. Few people believed it was ready for ordinary products. Ibuka did. The company bought a licence and spent years making the transistor work well enough to be built in quantity.

In 1955 they brought out their first transistor radio. A smaller one followed. They chose a new name that would be easy to say anywhere in the world: Sony. In 1958, the company itself took that name.

Ibuka and Morita worked side by side for the rest of their lives. Ibuka died in 1997, Morita in 1999. By then, Sony was known in almost every country on Earth.

It had started with radio repairs, a few adapters, and a rice cooker that never worked well enough to sell.

Want to read more?

Akio Morita's memoir, Made in Japan, tells the story of the company's early years in his own words. John Nathan's Sony: The Private Life is a fuller history. Sony's website has a detailed account of its beginnings, including the rice cooker.