How the Transistor Shaped Music
By Ainissa Ramirez
The improvement of the radio as an early application of this technological advance ended up influencing youth culture.
This Article From Issue
September-October 2025
Volume 113, Number 5
Page 274
When Patrick E. Haggerty was discharged from the Navy after World War II, he was itching to make a name for himself. In the spring of 1945, this 31-year-old electrical engineer joined a Dallas company called Geophysical Service Incorporated (GSI), which hunted for subterranean oil and gas using sound waves created by detonating dynamite. As his schoolmates from Marquette University in Wisconsin would have expected, Haggerty quickly climbed the corporate ladder. By 1951, he was the executive vice president and tasked with finding new lines of business. Haggerty knew exactly what that should be from his time as head of the Electronic Production branch of the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics. Haggerty, who was short in stature but not ambition, aimed GSI toward being a manufacturer of a technology conjured up at Bell Labs just a few years earlier—the transistor.
QUICK TAKE
- Invented in 1947, transistors were a breakthrough in controlling electricity in devices, but they initially lacked a civilian commercial product market that would reduce their cost.
- The first major products envisionedfor transistors were portable, pocket-sized AM radios, but keeping them compact and inexpensive required innovative engineering.
- Creating small, portable radios had the unexpected outcome of influencing youth culture, as teenagers could now listen to their choice of music away from adult supervision.
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