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Oral History – Ed Millis
(Continued)
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Hot transistors had higher
leakage currents than cool ones, and the tests were specified at a cool
temperature, like 25 Celsius. We had been throwing away good transistors
because the Bowling Alley had been reaching 90F, or 32C in the afternoons.
The employees being hot was one thing, but transistors quite another! And
so, the transistor production was moved over to the big (and air
conditioned) plant at 6000 Lemmon Ave. This happened in the late summer
and early fall of 1954.
Meanwhile, another group at TI
was quietly making history. The development of the first transistor radio
had begun. Pat Haggerty, far-seeing prime mover of Texas Instruments, had
correctly anticipated that the time had come, technically speaking, to
build an all-transistor radio to replace the vacuum tube sets that were on
the market. The tremendous effort made by the engineering team at TI to
make this radio a success has been documented in a number of places, and I
won’t repeat the story here. Just let me say that after Regency introduced
the TR1 in Dec 1954, TI’s transistor business really took off. Each of the
more than one hundred thousand of these radios sold by Regency had four TI
transistors! I was working in Jim Nygaard’s group in the spring of 1955
(Jim had recently graduated from Texas A&M and had been added to the TI
radio team in 1954), and he put together the “neat deal” of the decade.
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Oral History – Ed Millis
(Continued)
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He got each of us, about
fifteen people altogether, a set of Regency TR-1 parts, less only the
transistors and the resistors. We even got to choose the color of the
case. Then he acquired the necessary transistors and resistors for us and
we built our own Regency radios. I still have mine. Bless you, Jim, it’s
a treasure.
The production of transistors
for radios ramped up at an impossible rate and Nygaard’s transistor test
equipment group that I was assigned to was working night and day in an
attempt to keep up with the demands of production. The problem that I was
assigned was finding a better way to test the popular 2N185 transistors
that were used in pairs, as a ”push pull” output. This required the two
transistors to be very similar in electrical characteristics, like a
“matched pair”. Since, at that time, to quote one of the engineers “We
couldn’t hardly make one alike”, matching up our very broad, shotgun-type
distribution was an almighty tiresome chore. Lots of ladies sat poking
2N185s in test sockets and then putting them in little piles on the
tables. And then taking these piles, and sorting them into smaller
piles. We all had piles.
So I built a much-needed
machine that would match up the 2N185s automatically. The operator would
load a transistor in the test sockets and push a “GO” button.
Millis
Oral History, Page 4
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