When Panasonic Got Style, 1960s transistor radios

This 1968 transistor radio from Panasonic is... architectural.

By the late 1960s, most of the interesting radio designs were in the category that might be called novelty radios. Tiny micro radios... and radios in novelty shapes, styles, and colors, like these that I showed in a video I did about color in our era.

But what we’re looking at here today is one of the later '60s transistor radios that isn’t any kind of novelty but is a straight-head shirt-pocket radio... a piece of pure design and one I like very much. I call something with this sort of style "architectural." That's probably as descriptive a word as the hackneyed "cool." But somehow to me it means something that stands there nicely in its space, the way a beautiful building stands there nicely, appropriately, enhancing its environment, with dignity. I like the radio's perforated aluminum grill, and the way it wraps around, and the waffle-texture panel below the dial window is a nice feature too. The shape overall is rather angular, and usually I prefer the more roundy, organic, forms, but here the angularity just... works. Another nice touch is the quite beautiful lettering that says "Solid State." For those of you unfamiliar with that term, it began to be used on radios in the mid 1960s, as a techier way of saying "transistor." The vacuum tube, which the transistor replaced, was not solid state, since it did its business inside its glass walls in an open, or gaseous state. Solid state devices include the crystal diode, the transistor, and the integrated circuit.

This Panasonic is efficiently made, and I admire that too. It needed to be--since it was in competition against other radios whose makers spent literally nothing on design and thus had lower costs. As I mentioned in another video, Panasonic was a brand that, over the years, increasingly saw the value in styling. Their early radios were well-built certainly, but many had little grace to them designwise. The way products look depends on whether design originates with the engineers or with the stylists. Now, by stylists I'm not talking about decorators. I'm talking about artists and marketers focused on the end user. I think clearly Panasonic's early radios were driven by the engineering department whereas later ones were made in synergetic collaboration between engineers and these designer/stylists. Phrases like "synegetic collaboration" may rub you the wrong way, as they do me, but, as someone who has been in several of these sorts of successful collaborations in my career, it is most definitely a thing. And that is literally what we all want as consumers, isn't it?--products that are well-engineered, yet also intuitive, easy to use and good looking. Why this is so hard for so many companies to achieve...is because they don’t appreciate the value in each perspective, and how necessary it is to get the blend right. We are talking, ultimately, about the relationship of science and art. It’s just that simple... and just that huge.

A couple of other Panasonic items from this era show just how stylish the Panasonic folks were getting. This little television set, their TR-001 model was like nothing else on the market and was extremely well-built. It's from 1969. And this TV, from 1971, well, they were pulling out all the stops at this point with some dazzling stuff. Even the mundane calculator got special treatment with this stylish 850 model from 1972.

People in flea markets find radios for me and often ask me to describe what I'm looking for. I used to tell them, among other things, that if a radio says "Solid State" on it, it's too new for me, and I don't want it. Well, this is the radio that made me stop saying that.

The seven-transistor Panasonic R-1038 solid-state transistor radio. Architectural.

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