Masaru Ibuka

Masaru Ibuka was a Japanese electronics worker who is best known for being the co-founder of Sony.

Childhood
Masaru was the first and eldest son of his parents. His father died at a young age, and he moved to Kobe with his mother after she remarried. He passed an entrance exam at a local school where he was quite successful in his grades and studies there. Ibuka graduated from Waseda University in 1933, with a film company.

Adulthood
He then enlisted in the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II, and after wartime, started a radio repair shop in Nihonbashi. In 1946, Akio Morita decided to help Ibuka and join him with his business. With external funding, the duo founded the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation, which would later be known as Sony.

Sony era
Ibuka managed to obtain transistor technology, which was rare for a company that wasn’t in the military and warfare industry. With that technology, he led the R & D team to create the first version of the Trinitron TV in 1967. Ibuka served as president of Sony until 1971, and became chairman around that time, retiring in 1976.

Retirement
Ibuka retired from Sony in 1976, with a notable reputation as a technological entrepreneur. He received honorary doctorates from Tokyo’s Sophia University and Waseda Univerity, with one from the Brown University in the United States. He also received numerous awards and had one from the IEEE named after him. A book he wrote in 1971, Kindergarten is Too Late, became more popular around the time, being his final work. Masaru Ibuka died peacefully in the early morning of December 19, 1997.