Philco
Philco was a Philadelphia electronics company, founded as the Philadelphia Storage Battery Company, that grew from batteries into one of America's leading radio and television makers and then, in the 1950s, into a pioneer of high-speed transistors and transistorised computers before being acquired by Ford in 1961. In the transistor story it is the company that took a Bell licence and used it to build the first widely available fast germanium transistor, the surface-barrier type of 1953.
Its origins were in batteries, and the brand name came from the company's long, unwieldy original title. The firm traced its roots to the 1890s and became the Philadelphia Storage Battery Company in the early twentieth century, selling storage batteries for cars and, later, for early radio sets. A line of radios designed to run from household mains power, in the late 1920s, made it a major consumer-electronics brand, and the name Philco, a contraction of Philadelphia Storage Battery Company, became the corporate name in 1939. Through the 1930s to the 1950s the company sold millions of radios and televisions and kept a substantial research organisation, which is why it had the engineering staff to take advantage of the transistor when the opportunity arose.
Philco's transistor work began with a licence and moved quickly to its own invention. The company was one of the early licensees of the Bell patents following the 1952 symposium, and its research group, working in the Philadelphia area, developed the jet-electrolytic etching and plating method that produced the surface-barrier transistor, announced in 1953. That device, thinner in the base than anything made by melting or crystal growing, worked at frequencies far above those of the alloy-junction types competitors were selling, and Philco began manufacturing it for military and computer users, where speed was worth a high price. Its improved successor in 1957, the microalloy-diffused-base transistor, added a graded base and raised the speed and robustness still further. The company supplied transistors both for its own products and to other computer builders, notably for the MIT TX-0 of 1956.
The TRANSAC S-2000 of 1958 showed what the fast transistors were for. Philco's TRANSAC line, with the S-2000 introduced in 1958, was a large-scale transistorised scientific computer, built from the company's own high-speed germanium transistors rather than vacuum tubes, and it was among the first large commercial machines to be fully transistorised. It was aimed at government and scientific users who needed fast arithmetic, and it is part of the wave of machines, alongside the TX-0, the IBM 7090 and the Manchester transistor computer, that showed solid-state logic could replace tubes in serious computing. The fact that a battery-and-radio company built such a machine illustrates how thoroughly the transistor changed which firms could be leaders in electronics.
Philco's fortunes declined because high-speed germanium proved a transitional technology. The surface-barrier and microalloy devices were excellent but demanding to make, and by the late 1950s silicon, then the planar process of 1959, was displacing germanium, with Texas Instruments and Fairchild leading. Philco also faced heavy competition in consumer goods and had large fixed costs in a crowded radio and television market. Ford Motor Company acquired it in 1961, and the combined business was known as Philco-Ford, concentrating on defence electronics, aerospace and appliances. Ford later disposed of much of the original business, and the Philco name passed through several owners and licensees, still appearing on appliances and electronics in some markets today.
A common misconception is that Philco simply copied Bell's transistor. In reality it contributed a distinct manufacturing method, with the electrochemical jet process, and a distinct performance class, so it stands with Texas Instruments among the licensees that advanced the technology rather than just producing it. The opposite error is to view Philco as a long-term semiconductor leader: its transistor lead lasted only a few years, and its lasting influence was in showing that a fast germanium switch made transistor computers possible.
Read Philco as the radio-and-battery company that used its Bell licence to invent the first fast commercial transistor and a transistorised computer to go with it, then lost the race to silicon and was absorbed by Ford, a compact example of how a transistor boom could make and unmake electronics companies within a decade.