Why shops once sorted gadgets into black, brown and white goods
Walk into an American electronics shop decades ago and the radios, televisions and stereos were black goods, named for their dark casings. British sellers called the same things brown goods, after the wooden cabinets that housed them. Fridges and washing machines were white goods. Since the 2010s, big stores have largely stopped drawing the line.
The first big consumer electronic product was the broadcast radio receiver of the early twentieth century. Record players had spent their first fifty years as purely mechanical machines, with a needle and a horn, until the vacuum tubes that made radio practical were borrowed to drive loudspeakers. Television came soon after, yet it barely registered in wealthy countries until the 1950s and did not spread widely across the rest of the world until the 1970s.
The transistor changed the scale. John Bardeen and Walter Brattain built the first working one at Bell Labs in 1947, and a Japanese firm then called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, now Sony, turned the technology into affordable pocket radios and later televisions. Integrated circuits, first built largely for military use, pushed prices down further, bringing pocket calculators and, by the 1980s, game consoles and home computers within reach of ordinary families. Digitisation followed, with compact discs and ever sharper screens.
Falling prices are the industry's defining habit. Factories became more automated, production moved to lower-wage countries, and chips kept improving under Moore's law, which observes that a given price buys roughly twice the semiconductor capability every two years. Today most gadgets are built in China, in cities such as Shenzhen and Dongguan. By 2004 the business was worth 240 billion dollars a year, with Asia Pacific holding 35 percent of the market.
Convergence has swallowed whole product categories: a single smartphone now stands in for a camera, radio, television and camcorder. One historical study notes that radios and televisions spread through homes far faster than kitchen machines did, even though American households spent only about 0.5 percent of disposable income on appliances in 1920 and around 2 percent by 1980.
Source: Consumer electronics
