Before Sony became a global electronics empire worth billions, before the Walkman revolutionized music and the PlayStation dominated gaming, the company's very first product attempt was... a rice cooker. And it was an absolute disaster.

A Wooden Tub With Dreams

In 1945, fresh from the devastation of World War II, engineer Masaru Ibuka founded Tokyo Tsushin Kenkyujo (Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute). While the company mainly repaired radios, Ibuka wanted to create something new. His first invention? An electric rice cooker made from a wooden tub with aluminum electrodes bolted to the bottom.

The concept was simple. The reality was chaos.

The Problem With Perfect Rice

Rice is deceptively difficult to cook electronically. Different varieties need different water ratios and cooking times. Sony's prototype had no way to account for these variables. The result was predictably inconsistent:

Some batches came out burned and crusty
Others remained stubbornly undercooked and crunchy
Occasionally, through sheer luck, the rice was edible
The wooden tub would sometimes crack or leak

The rice cooker never made it to market. Not a single unit sold. The prototype now sits in a glass case at the Sony Archives in Shinagawa, Tokyo - a monument to failure that launched an empire.

From Failure to Fortune

In May 1946, Ibuka partnered with Akio Morita to form Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. (Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation), nicknamed "Totsuko." They learned from the rice cooker debacle and pivoted to what they knew best: telecommunications.

Their first successful product? A power megaphone released in October 1947. It actually worked. From there, the company launched Japan's first tape recorder, then magnetic recording tape, then transistor radios that could fit in a pocket.

In 1958, the company rebranded as "Sony" - a mashup of "sonus" (Latin for sound) and "sonny" (American slang for bright young men). The rest is history.

The Rice Cooker's Revenge

Here's the twist: Sony never did figure out rice cookers. That prize went to Toshiba, which released the first successful automatic electric rice cooker in 1955. Today, rice cooker technology is dominated by companies like Zojirushi and Tiger - but none of them can claim the distinction of being Sony's magnificent first failure.

Sometimes the products that never launch teach us more than the ones that do. Sony's wooden rice cooker proved that even brilliant engineers fail, pivot, and build empires from the lessons learned. Every PlayStation and Bravia TV traces its lineage back to a wooden tub that couldn't cook rice.

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