"...cruisin' and playin' the radio with no particular place to go"
Chuck Berry was born on October 18th, 1926. On that same date in 1954, Chuck’s 28th birthday, an invention came into the world that played a huge part in Mr. Berry’s destiny: the transistor radio. Berry signed his first recording contract the following year, and for the rest of the 1950s he was one of the kings of rock and roll.
The first commercial transistor radio was the Regency TR-1, made by Texas Instruments and unveiled to the public on October 18th, 1954. By the end of that year more than 100,000 of them had been sold, even though the general consensus was that the new transistor radios were inferior to their bulky predecessors.
The Regency TR-1: even the design seems to hint at the iPod...
Chuck could not have asked for a better birthday present that year. Transistors replaced vacuum tubes as the main electronic component of the radio. This was a huge advancement in technology, because tubes were large, fragile, and had to be replaced periodically. The new technology meant that personal radios could be much smaller, and therefore portable. This was the first time that people could listen to music anywhere, at any time, and this invention has led us inevitably to iPods and mp3 players. Music fans and teenagers lived on their portable radios back then, and they no doubt played a vital role in rock music’s cultural ascent and spread in the 1950s. And Chuck Berry was one of the original architects of that explosion of music.
