He had shirts custom-made for his salesmen featuring a slightly larger pocket. The catch phrase would have lost its punch - except for a little ruse on Morita's part. Unfortunately though, the TR-63 was just barely larger than the pocket on a typical businessman's dress shirt. We now use it without a second thought, but who would ever guess that it originated as a Japanese-English term invented by Totsuko when it launched the TR-63? Today the word "pocketable" appears in English dictionaries. It seems that when the TR-63 came out, radios small enough to be slipped into a pocket were known in the US as "pocket" radios. The selling price of 13,800 yen equalled the monthly paycheck of the avarage Japanese salary earner. The TR-63 also consumed less than half the power. Compared to the 127x76x33mm dimensions of the TR-1 and its four transistors, the TR-63 measured 112x71x32mm and used six transistors for better recetion and output. It measured up favorably against the Regency TR-1 model, which had beaten Totsuko's transistor radio to become the world's first and, until the TR-63, had been the world's smallest. This was to be the world's smallest transistor radio, the TR-63 pocketable radio. Totsuko had another revolutionary product concept up its sleeve, one that would surely capture the public's imagination. As a result, Totsuko received orders through NHK from 200 schools all over the country. The TR-81, brought out at the end of 1956, was chosen by NHK for use by schools in remote areas. Around this time, Totsuko added a number of new models to its range of transistor radios.
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