I reflect on how Sony’s roots began with a failed electric rice‑cooker prototype in 1945, which never reached the market but sparked my later engineering efforts.
In 1945 I built an electric rice cooker that was essentially a wooden tub with aluminium electrodes and could not cook rice properly, so the prototype was abandoned.
In 1946 I partnered with Akio Morita to establish Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, which later became Sony.
Our first commercial success was a tape recorder, not the rice cooker, and that early pivot set the stage for later breakthroughs like the Walkman.