In 1978, Masaru Ibuka, Sony’s co-founder and a serious music lover, packed the company’s newest portable on a business trip abroad. The TC-D5 could record and play in stereo. It was also the size of a textbook and weighed about 1.7 kilograms. On the plane, with a pair of headphones, Ibuka enjoyed the music. He found the machine far too heavy.
Before his next trip to the United States, he went to Norio Ohga with a request. “I can do without recording, so could you just install the circuits for stereo sound into this Pressman?”
The Pressman, launched that year, was a mono tape recorder with a built-in speaker, small enough to sit in the palm of a hand. Engineers in Kozo Ohsone’s tape recorder division took the recording function out, put stereo in its place, and plugged in some headphones they had lying around. The sound surprised them. Ibuka walked in, listened, and was delighted. He took the machine on his trip, and when he got back he handed it to his co-founder, Akio Morita.
Morita listened. “This might be big,” he said.
In February 1979, Morita called in young staff from across the company. Holding the modified Pressman, he told them it would need no recording function: a cassette player with headphones would sell. He wanted it in shops before the school summer holidays, four months away. Most of the room was reluctant. Then Morita set the price. Sony was 33 years old that year, so it would be 33,000 yen.
Ohsone had learned something from experience. A first model exists to test an idea, and “if the device is viewed as fragile or dysfunctional, then the concept also ends up in the trash.” The team was short of time, too, and on Morita’s advice the guts of the first Walkman were the Pressman’s, a mechanism already proven over 500,000 units. Sony’s Audio Technology Center had been working on open-air headphones that weighed 50 grams, against 300 to 400 for typical headphones then. In March the two teams were put together.
The doubts did not go away. “No one wants a ‘tape player’ that can only play tapes. If it can’t record anything, it’ll never sell,” some at Sony objected. Morita ordered a first run of 30,000 anyway, at a time when selling 15,000 tape recorders a month was considered good.
The launch on June 22 put reporters on a bus from Ginza to Yoyogi Park, handed each of them a Walkman, and told them to press play. Most newspapers ignored it. The Walkman went on sale on July 1, 1979. By the end of July, about 3,000 had sold.
Sony’s own staff, meanwhile, took it to the street. Advertising and sales people rode Tokyo’s Yamanote loop line all day wearing Walkmans. On Sundays they walked through Shinjuku and Ginza, stopping strangers and asking them to listen. People looked puzzled until they put the headphones on. At partner shops, sales staff walked the floor with a Walkman and a demo tape, and magazine ads showed young idols wearing one.
By the end of August, all 30,000 had sold out. For six months afterwards, shops kept running out. Abroad, Sony’s sales companies thought “Walkman” was bad English and sold it as the Soundabout in the US, the Stowaway in Britain and the Freestyle in Australia. In April 1980, Morita made it the Walkman everywhere. In 1986, the word went into the Oxford English Dictionary.