Page 35 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

next few years, he made a number of other improvements to his
looms, and by 1896 he had produced a steam-driven power loom
that quadrupled productivity. Toyoda’s tinkering not only led
him to automatic loom design, but necessarily also took him into
engine design—after all, the automatic looms needed a power
source. But his best-known innovation, an innovation that set
the pattern for all of Toyota’s future history, was a way of elimi-
nating common mistakes in the weaving process.
Using a manual loom, it was easy to spot mistakes and qual-
ity problems—the process was quite slow, allowing the weaver to
closely inspect the cloth continuously. But the faster rate of auto-
matic looms meant that defects or problems were harder to spot.
And when an error occurred—the most common problem was
a thread breaking—the loom could keep running long after the
product was ruined. For a cottage weaving shop, this was poten-
tially disastrous. Such a shop couldn’t afford to waste materials,
so people were stationed at the “automatic” looms to shut them
down in case there were problems.
Of course, that defeated a lot of the benefit of automation. In
response, Sakichi Toyoda invented a mechanism that would stop
the loom automatically as soon as a thread broke. As he put it, he
“freed the person from the machine” so that people could spend
their time doing value-added work instead of simply monitor-
ing the machine. This and other innovations were so ground-
breaking that Platt Brothers of England, the world’s dominant
loom maker, eventually bought the rights to one of Toyoda’s most
popular looms. The proceeds from the sale funded the start-up
of Toyota Motor Corporation. Now referred to in Japan as the
“king of inventors,” Sakichi Toyoda also is credited as being a
leader in fueling Japan’s industrial revolution.

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