In 1926, radio was still a very new technology. The German government, reeling under high inflation and reparations payments required by the Treaty of Versailles, was desperate to raise money. Someone came up with the brilliant idea of taxing radios. But the tax wasn’t on the full unit. It was based on the number of vacuum tubes each receiver could use. The more tubes in your radio, the higher the tax—the “Rundfunksteuer”—you paid.
This prompted Lowe, a German radio maker, to develop a solution. They devised a single tube that contained nine components that required just a single socket. This allowed Lowe to offer their radios at a substantially lower price than all of their competitors. In the history of all electronics, his little innovation has gone down as the very first integrated circuit. And only happened because of a weird government tax.
© 2026 Corus Radio, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
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