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Sony was built in bombed-out Tokyo, in a shack so leaky that its co-founder, Akio Morita, sometimes worked under an umbrella.

That shack became the company behind PlayStation, the Spider-Man movies and iPhone camera sensors.

Steve Jobs wanted Apple to be Sony.

And Morita once turned down an order for 100,000 radios, just to protect the Sony name.

He was heir to a 300-year-old sake business. But he loved sound, built his own radio, and almost flunked out of school.

After the war he chose radios over sake: he joined the engineer Masaru Ibuka, and his father let him go.

Their first flop, in a burned-out department store: a rice cooker that mostly ruined the rice.

In 1955, the American watch giant Bulova wanted their radios, but only under the Bulova name.

He said no: "Fifty years from now I promise you that our name will be just as famous as your company name is today."

When their new radio was a bit too big for a shirt pocket, he gave his salesmen shirts with bigger pockets.

Back then, the world thought "Made in Japan" meant paper umbrellas and cheap trinkets. He moved his family to New York to learn America.

In 1979 came the Walkman, music you could take anywhere. He threatened to quit if it flopped. Sony went on to make 150 million.

Even Steve Jobs's black turtleneck began with a question to Morita about Sony's uniforms.

Not every bet won: Sony's Betamax lost to VHS, and the Hollywood studio it bought cost billions, years before Spider-Man.

At 72, at his seven a.m. tennis game, he had a stroke. He died six years later.

In 1996, Americans named Sony their No. 1 brand. He'd promised fifty years. It took 41.

All of it grew up under a leaky roof.