How that iPod got under your tree

Thank the mighty transistor

Sixty-two years ago, as of Dec. 23, scientists over at Bell Laboratories first demonstrated the electronic transistor. So what, right? Not so fast, kids! Until that fateful day, music players had been built around big, hot glass vacuum tubes (seriously), which meant they weren’t really portable. If you wanted to listen to music, you had to do it at home or in the car, and almost always with your parents around (a total bummer in any era). Once the transistor—which did the job of those soda bottle-sized tubes in a package closer to that of a paper clip—became available, it paved the way for portable, hand-held transistor radios, the Walkman and, eventually, a revolutionary little game-changer called the iPod. Here, Metromix presents a brief run through the gadgets music-lovers have carted around since the transistor revolution. — Keith N. Dusenberry, Special to Metromix