The service manual for the first transistor radio.

Odd, that; it uses NPN Ge transistors? Weren't the first good transistors PNP Ge? Four transistors; that's pretty good engineering. Six (push/pull output accounts for one addition) was the more familiar number used. I think it was because they took the dud transistors and used one for the AM detector diode.

I actually bought one 'eight transistor' model, and found transistors with all three terminals soldered together...

Like were used in early, discrete logic circuits?

That was a Japanese marketing concept that came later. TI/Reqency had no competition when this hit the market. Sony introduced the third transistor radio, before they changed their name to Sony.

This was an American design.

A lot of those crap designs had high failure rates, so some shops pulled all the unused cans to use for repairs.

Did you read the circuit descriptions? The transistors are self biasing, It has a two stage 262KHz IF amp, with AvC on the first IF amp.

I think the PNP germaniums were actually worse than the NPN germaniums, they were just cheaper to manufacture given the materials. With silicon it's the reverse.

Cheap, low beta, slow, fine for low frequencies and used a lot but maybe not a radio that was supposed to be cutting-edge.

I had a TR-1. I think it cost $35, about what my dad made in a week.

It definitely wasn't a toy or disposable product like they were decades later; the original retail price was $50, which was the better part of a week's salary in 1954 for a working-class person.

The tombstone table radio I bought at an antique store over the weekend retailed for $30 in 1935, that would've been over a month's income for an average family

My dad bought this Sony transistor radio when I was about 10:

I think it cost him the equivalent of about $100 then. It used four D cells, separate oscillator and mixer, two IF stages, two AF preamp stages and a push=pull output. The transistors were all Hitachi Ge PNP types. Good sound and sensitivity.

It merited a full-page ad in LIFE magazine. I remember the ad saying that extending the aerial and pointing it to the north would catch more stations.

At that time, the only program in my language was a half-hour slot in a station ~200 air-miles away. The nearest stations broadcasting English pop songs were Rangoon, Burma (Yangon, Myanmar) 850 km and Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) 2300 km from my town.

Sadly, Sony's primary business lately seems to be getting owned by hackers:

And filing millions of frivolous DMCA copyright takedown notifications on YouTube:

Sony, what the hell happened to you? You used to be beautiful.