Akio Morita

What failed

The company he co-founded with Masaru Ibuka in 1946 began in a bombed-out department store, and the banks would not lend to it. An early electrically heated cushion scorched people's bedding. Their first tape recorder, the G-Type, weighed thirty-five kilograms, cost a hundred and sixty thousand yen, and several months after launch had sold exactly one. The ministry refused them permission to make transistors, on the grounds that a shabby weed-covered factory like theirs was not up to it. An American company beat them to the world's first transistor radio. And when they finally had one ready, the cabinets warped in the May heat and the product was scrapped.

What happened next

A redesigned radio, the TR-55, went on sale in September 1955 as the first SONY-branded product to reach the market; the name had first appeared on the TR-52, whose sale was scrapped. The pocket radio of 1957 opened the export market, and the company took the name officially in 1958.

The point

The rice cooker everyone cites was real, but it was Ibuka's, in 1945, before Morita had joined and before the company existed — its own official history calls it Failed Prototype No. 1. The failures that actually belong to the pair of them are duller and better: a tape recorder nobody wanted, a ministry that thought them beneath the work, and a plastic case that warped in the sun.