In Japan, two such engineers and entrepreneurs were the co-founders of SONY, Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka. Ibuka died on 19 December 1997, almost 50 years to the day after that announcement from Bell Labs and the debut of the invention which he was to help develop so far.

Ibuka was born on 11 April 1908, in the beautiful town of Nikko in Tochigi Prefecture, about 100 km north of Tokyo. His was a technologically aware family — his father had studied electrochemistry at the school which has now become the famous Tokyo Institute of Technology, and as a young man he constructed one of Japan's first water-driven electrical power stations.

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