He made impossible possible

Nobutoshi Kihara was the engineer known as the ''Wizard of Sony'' for his ingenuity in developing products - Japan's first tape recorder and transistor radio and the Betamax videocassette recorder - that helped propel the company's rise from the ashes of war to global electronics giant.

Kihara, whose innovations helped win more than 700 patents, led in developing the company's first success, a magnetic tape recorder and its magnetic tape. The transistor radio and television, one of the world's first videotape recorders the Betamax, eight-millimetre video movies, the digital still camera known as Mavica and a catalogue of smaller, lighter variations of these followed.

Though Kihara was widely known as ''Mr Walkman'', another engineer created the world's first commercial personal stereo system. But Kihara's earlier innovations provided the backbone for the Walkman. Akio Morita, one of Sony's two founders, had asked Kihara, then a top engineering executive, to find a way for him to listen to operas on long-haul business flights.

It was Kihara's relationship with Sony's other founder, Masaru Ibuka, that rained magic. Projects usually began with a rambling, almost telepathic conversation in which Ibuka was careful not to offend Kihara by issuing a direct order. Often, as soon as the next day, Kihara would delightedly show Ibuka a prototype of the concept they had discussed.

''I loved making him happy,'' Kihara said; Ibuka referred to Kihara as ''a godlike person'' in one of his books.

Nobutoshi Kihara was born in Tokyo on October 14, 1926. His family had a background in engineering and as a boy he enjoyed dissecting the motor of his model locomotive. To pay uni fees, he fixed discarded radios.

In 1947, as he was preparing to graduate from Waseda University in Tokyo, he responded to a job ad on a bulletin board placed by the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company, which would become Sony.

Kihara's exuberance about electronics - and experience with radios - wiped concerns that his background was in mechanical, not electrical, engineering. His first major development was a tape recorder: he heated ground iron in a frypan to collect the ferric oxide needed for magnetic tape.

A shortage of court stenographers created an immediate market for the recorders. He kept developing smaller models.