The First Panasonic radio? 1950s in BOX - transistor radios Matsushita, National, Maco

Описание: I'm always being asked, hey, what's the first Panasonic product ever made? ... No I'm not.


And it's not an easy question to answer. You've got to start with Matsushita. That's the company behind the Panasonic brand and they go back to 1918. The Matsushita name WAS used on products in the English-speaking world, but management suspected they'd do better with a name that was easier for western-types to say, and remember. So since 1927 they'd also been using the brand National at home and in many other countries. I'm guessing that's what this says, Japanese being one of the many languages in which I can claim total illiteracy. But there was a problem with them using the National name in the United States since there was already an electronics brand National in the US, the National Radio Company based in Malden, Massachusetts.

So, in 1955, when they were wanting to take a serious crack at the American market, Matsushita coined the word "PanaSonic," a combination of "pan," meaning universal, everywhere, wide, like panorama or pan-Africa... and "sonic" which of course relates to sound. This name they introduced on a hi-fi speaker, THE PanaSonic, as you can see. And THIS is the world's first Panasonic anything.

But they kept using the other names too. And Matsushita used... still another name on products in these years, the name "Maco." Well, I say Maco, but I suppose it is Mack-O since it comes from "Matsushita Company." They seem a little ashamed of this name since official company histories eliminate entirely the existence of the Maco brand.

So what we have here is the oldest product I've ever owned with the name Panasonic on it. And it's got this early Panasonic logo I've never seen on any other product. Incorporated in this rather quirkly logo symbol is the Matsushita three-pointed star... not to be confused with the Mitsubishi three-pointed star. No. That is an entirely different outfit... I've got a couple of this Panasonic radio's cousins to show you too, in a minute, one branded National, and one branded Matsushita--so stay tuned.

This is a quality piece of work. With a quality genuine leather case too. The metal grille is substantial, to say the least. On the side there's an external antenna jack, a hi/lo tone switch, and TWO jacks for external speaker or earphone. You can plug external speaker or earphone into either one, the difference in the jacks is that using the top one disconnects the radio's internal speaker, whereas using the bottom one lets that speaker play in addition to whatever you plugged in. There's a jack for an AC adaptor on the back and this is a premium feature not often seen on transistor radios.

Internal power is supplied by four penlight batteries which, the instruction book informs us will last longer if the radio is played at lower volume. Sounds like the kind of thing my dad would say.

This little instruction book is a high quality piece of work too. It's 12-pages of perfect English without any of those funny translation quirks I like to see. Darn it. On close inspection, one of the pages, the one about battery installation, has a sticker over part of the page where presumably an error had to be corrected. Very neatly done--I almost didn't notice it. On the "Product Service" page the word "Panasonic" appears in a different font and size. Perhaps they are highlighting the new Panasonic name, but it looks to me more like the Panasonic name replaced some other name that was there previously.

But now what's this? A National branded version of this radio. It's also a T-50 model but it's not identical. The dial display is different... and something quite structural is different as well. The National has a white bottom section. On the back we see that the National does not have a battery door where the Panasonic does. There's an inset metal panel on the back of the National that's different, but we see the same AC adaptor jack as on the Panasonic. Over on the side we see that the hi/lo tone switch is gone. Not here on this model. The external antenna jack is here, but moved, and the earphone jacks have moved up... to the top.... And now if that's not enough, ... here's the Matsushita version. It looks in almost every respect like the National version and has all the same things in all the same places. The fact that they issued this essentially same radio with three different names on it is one of the curious questions with unknowable answers that keeps collecting interesting. I wonder if there's a Maco version out there somewhere.

As you can see, this white bottom section on the National and Matushita is removable and is how batteries are changed on these models. It's somewhat of an improvement over the fussier business of battery changing that was necessary with the Panasonic.

Inside the Panasonic looks like this. These people were not fooling around.