On June 21, 1979, Sony presented the first Walkman, a portable cassette player with headphones that could be taken along during a bike ride or walk, for example.
The Walkman was available for purchase from July 1 that same year and became very popular. Several other brands subsequently launched similar devices. However, these companies were not allowed to call their device a ‘Walkman’, that word was reserved for Sony players. Many other brands appeared under the name ‘portable cassette player’, but people often simply spoke of ‘walkmans’.
For the first version of the real Walkman, music lovers had to pay about 150 dollars. Sony initially developed only 30,000 units, which indicates that the company was not immediately convinced that the device would be a huge hit. However, this did happen. The Walkman became the sales hit of Sony in the eighties.
Advertisement for the Walkman (1983)
Also striking about the Walkmans were the supplied headphones. These were much lighter than many other headphones in circulation. This made walking around with music suddenly very normal and accessible. The Walkman made listening to music a very personal experience. One could now listen to the favorite artists without much effort, for example on the train or on a bicycle.
According to Kuroki Yasuo, Sony’s head of development at the time, there was no big plan to make a Walkman. The device is said to have arisen simply because some young developers wondered whether it was even possible to make a portable cassette player with headphones. Initially, however, there were no real plans for a commercial line. But when the device was commercially produced, it turned out that they had a ‘bite’.
Akio Morita and Andreas Pavel
If you look up a biography of the Sony founder Akio Morita, you will usually read that it was this Japanese who invented the Walkman. That’s right, but there was really no real invention . The German-Brazilian Andreas Pavel, for example, had already developed a similar device in 1972 – seven years before the launch of Sony’s version. Pavel was looking for a way to listen to music during his daily routine and designed a device that closely resembled the later Walkman. The inventor named his new device Stereobelt. After moving to Switzerland from Brazil, Pavel approached several electronics manufacturers in the hope that one of them would bring the device to market. However, none of the manufacturers saw anything in the device. The companies did not believe that people were waiting to listen to music with headphones while walking. Pavel nevertheless continued to believe in his invention and in 1977 received a patent for his device in several countries.
After the launch of the Walkman, Sony and Pavel were engaged in a legal battle over the patent for years. It only came to an end after almost twenty-five years. Sony then decided to settle the case outside the courtroom and paid Pavel a substantial amount of money. How much exactly has never been made clear. An amount of approximately USD 10 million is often mentioned.
The Norelco Carry-Corder 150 from Philips
In 1965, long before the early portable players from Sony and Pavel, Philips already released a portable device that could play cassette tapes: the Norelco Carry-Corder 150. This device weighed more than one and a half kilos and could both play and record music.
Hipsters
Sony itself also went with the times. As cassette tapes were increasingly supplanted by CDs and MP3 players, the company came up with modified Walkmans that could handle these new techniques. Since 2010, no Walkmans with cassette tapes have been sold at all. It is estimated that some two hundred million copies of the popular device had been sold by that time. The company still sells MP3 players under the Walkman name.
