page_title: Toshiba
section_title: 1939 to 2000
hierarchical_section_title: Toshiba / History / 1939 to 2000
caption_attribution_description: 科学万博
context_page_description: Toshiba Corporation is a Japanese multinational conglomerate headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. Its diversified products and services include power, industrial and social infrastructure systems, elevators and escalators, electronic components, semiconductors, hard disk drives, printers, batteries, lighting, logistics, as well as IT solutions such as quantum cryptography. It had been one of the biggest manufacturers of personal computers, consumer electronics, home appliances, and medical equipment. As a semiconductor company and the inventor of flash memory, Toshiba had been one of top 10 in the chip industry until the late 2010s, when it was spun off as Kioxia, to save Toshiba from bankruptcy.
  Toshiba was founded in 1939 as Tokyo Shibaura Denki K.K. through the merger of Shibaura Seisaku-sho and Tokyo Denki. The company name was officially changed to Toshiba Corporation in 1978. It is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, where it was a constituent of the Nikkei 225 and TOPIX indices, the Nagoya Stock Exchange, and the London Stock Exchange.
context_section_description: Toshiba was founded in 1939 by the merger of Shibaura Seisakusho (Shibaura Engineering Works) and Tokyo Denki (Tokyo Electric). Shibaura Seisakusho had been founded as Tanaka Seisakusho by Tanaka Hisashige in July 1875 as Japan's first manufacturer of telegraph equipment. In 1904, it was renamed Shibaura Seisakusho. Through the first decades of the 20th century, Shibaura Seisakusho had become a major manufacturer of heavy electrical machinery as Japan modernized during the Meiji Era and became a world industrial power. Tokyo Denki was founded as Hakunetsusha in 1890 and had been Japan's first producer of incandescent electric lamps. It later diversified into the manufacture of other consumer products and in 1899 had been renamed Tokyo Denki. The merger of Shibaura and Tokyo Denki created a new company called Tokyo Shibaura Denki (Tokyo Shibaura Electric) (東京 芝浦 電気). It was soon nicknamed Toshiba, but it was not until 1978 that the company was officially renamed Toshiba Corporation.
  The group expanded rapidly, driven by a combination of organic growth and by acquisitions, buying heavy engineering, and primary industry firms in the 1940s and 1950s. Groups created include Toshiba Music Industries/Toshiba EMI (1960), Toshiba International Corporation (the 1970s) Toshiba Electrical Equipment (1974), Toshiba Chemical (1974), Toshiba Lighting and Technology (1989), Toshiba America Information Systems (1989) and Toshiba Carrier Corporation (1999).
  Toshiba is responsible for a number of Japanese firsts, including radar (1912), the TAC digital computer (1954), transistor television and microwave oven (1959), color video phone (1971), Japanese word processor (1978), MRI system (1982), laptop personal computer (1986), NAND EEPROM (1991), DVD (1995), the Libretto sub-notebook personal computer (1996) and HD DVD (2005). It began to manufacture color CRTs in 1959.
  In 1977, Toshiba acquired the Brazilian company Semp (Sociedade Eletromercantil Paulista), subsequently forming Semp Toshiba through the combination of the two companies' South American operations.
  In 1987, Tocibai Machine, a subsidiary of Toshiba, was accused of illegally selling CNC milling machines used to produce very quiet submarine propellers to the Soviet Union in violation of the CoCom agreement, an international embargo on certain countries to COMECON countries. The Toshiba-Kongsberg scandal involved a subsidiary of Toshiba and the Norwegian company Kongsberg Vaapenfabrikk. The incident strained relations between the United States and Japan, and resulted in the arrest and prosecution of two senior executives, as well as the imposition of sanctions on the company by both countries. Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania said "What Toshiba and Kongsberg did was ransom the security of the United States for $517 million."
caption: The Toshiba pavilion at Expo '85.
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