Sony’s first product was a rice cooker that didn’t work.
Masaru Ibuka’s team built the cooker in a bomb-damaged Tokyo department store, and the rice came out overcooked one time and half-raw the next. In 1946 he and Akio Morita founded the company as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo. Later Morita fused the Latin sonus, meaning sound, with the slang sonny to make a word every market could say, Sony.
Sony on Brandseum