Small, portable, and convenient, transistor radios did not offer excellence in sound quality, but they did provide another important feature—privacy. American teenagers saw the pocket radios as a way to listen to the driving beat of rock and roll (see entry under 1950s—Music in volume 3) music, away from the judgments of their parents. The first transistor radio (the Regency TR-1) was produced by Regency Electronics in cooperation with Texas Instruments in 1954.

The magazine Popular Mechanics had published instructions for building a do-it-yourself pocket radio, using a wooden glove box for the body, in 1925. The invention of the transistor in the early 1950s paved the way for a mass-produced pocket radio. A transistor is a small device, about the size of a pencil eraser, that generates and amplifies electric signals. It could be used instead of the bulkier vacuum tubes to control the signals that...