7 Billion and Counting

October 18th, 2006

Today in 1954, Regency announced the first transistor radio. It went on sale that November.

It cost $49.95 (the equivalent of $361 in year-2005 dollars) and sold something near 150,000 units. [...] Transistor radios did not achieve mass popularity until the early 1960s when prices of some models fell below $20, then below $10 as markets became flooded with radios from Hong Kong by the mid to late 1960s.

The transistor radio’s Wikipedia entry calls it “the single most popular communications device in existence.”

Some estimates suggest that there are at least seven billion of them in existence, almost all tunable to the common AM band, and an increasingly high percentage of those also tunable to the FM band.