The Loom Invention That Secretly Built Toyota’s Car Empire

Sakichi Toyoda was a carpenter-turned-inventor, not an engineering-school graduate, from Shizuoka Prefecture in Japan. In 1890, 23-year-old Toyoda invented a wooden hand loom with a single-motion batten, allowing weavers such as his mother to pass the shuttle through the warp threads using just one hand instead of struggling against the synchronized one-hand-one-foot operation of the previous model. This modification improved weaving efficiency by up to 50%. He patented the loom in 1891. It was here that Toyota began. Not under the hood.

Toyoda couldn’t afford the imported Western power looms that many weaving mills in Japan were buying at the time. So the young man, now living in Nagoya, decided to invent his own version at much lower cost. In 1896, he constructed Japan’s first powered weaving loom using local wood instead of costly imported materials, combined with simple metal gears and a drive shaft connected to a steam engine. This hybrid machine produced around 20 times more cloth than the older hand-operated looms. That was the birth of a new approach: solve the funding issue with ingenuity rather than foreign hardware.

If even one thread snapped while a cloth was being produced on a power loom, yards of it would be ruined unless someone monitored the machine continuously. Between 1900 and 1906, Toyoda solved it by adding a mechanism that halted the power loom the instant a thread broke. One worker could now oversee dozens of machines. Toyoda called it “Jidoka,” or automation with a human touch. It remains a key feature of Toyota’s production system, where any worker can halt the assembly line to correct a problem.

In 1918, Sakichi Toyoda launched a spinning and weaving company in Aichi Prefecture, Japan, to demonstrate that his equipment was capable of producing actual woven goods. Kiichiro Toyoda, Sakichi’s son and an engineering graduate from Tokyo Imperial University, went with him. In 1923, the father and son established a testing facility in Kariya, Japan. They installed hundreds of looms at the factory and operated them on full production runs. It was also at this Kariya facility that the family conducted its initial automobile projects.

The Type G Automatic Loom, invented by Sakichi and his son Kiichiro Toyoda, was completed in 1924 in Kariya, Japan. It replaced the worn-out thread with a new one while running at maximum speed without stopping the machine and set a new global standard for loom productivity. In 1926, the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works was established with 1 million yen of capital to manufacture this product. Kiichiro’s brother-in-law Risaburo Toyoda was elected president of the company, and Kiichiro became managing director. This company would later evolve into Toyota Motor Corporation.

Platt Brothers & Co. of Oldham, England, the largest maker of textile machinery in the world, agreed to buy the export rights to the Type G loom for 100,000 pounds in 1929. After a round of Depression-era renegotiations, the final price was closer to 83,500 pounds when the deal was completed in 1934. The funds were poured into the loom firm’s general coffers rather than individual pockets, but they demonstrated that the Japanese industry had a place on the world stage and emboldened its management to invest in other areas, like cars.

In 1930, as Sakichi Toyoda lay dying in Nagoya, Japan, he reportedly told his son to take the family business outside of the realm of looms and into that of automobiles. The Japanese public needed to have transportation produced within the country, he said. Besides, “I devoted most of my life to inventing looms,” he said. “Now it is your turn.” It was October when Sakichi Toyoda, then aged 63, passed away. But those few sentences were enough for Kiichiro Toyoda to have the courage and justification to pursue the idea of building a car.

A research department, not a car maker per se, the Automotive Division was founded on September 1, 1933, by Kiichiro Toyoda, Sakichi’s son and managing director of the loom company. At the time, Japanese subsidiaries of Ford and General Motors held more than 90% of the Japanese car market. Kiichiro’s side project was attempting to enter an industry that was almost entirely under foreign control.

In late 1933, Kiichiro Toyoda’s engineers purchased a Chevrolet sedan and a Chrysler Airflow. They shipped the two cars to the Kariya facility in Japan, where engineers completely dismantled them and made measurements of every component. This was not some unusual act of technical espionage. At that point in history, reverse-engineering foreign products was routine industrial practice throughout the world. The group used the Chevy’s robust, six-cylinder powerplant as the basis for their own machine, while also emulating the Airflow’s sleek shape. By August 1934, their very first prototype engine ran.

Kiichiro Toyoda’s engineers in Kariya, Japan, were trying to cast a thin-walled, multi-cylinder iron engine block, and their initial engine blocks came out cracked, porous, and leaking. They found their solution in the loom side of the business, where foundry workers at Toyoda Automatic Loom Works had been making complicated iron frames for weaving looms for decades. By improving the quality of their sand molds and the purity of their iron alloy, they made perfect engine blocks by late 1934. A solution from the loom solved a problem in the car.

Kiichiro Toyoda’s team at Kariya in Japan produced three prototype passenger cars, the Model A1, in May 1935. Kiichiro was running out of money, though, and quickly put an A1 chassis and engine in a truck, the Model G1, which was ready by November. The G1 went on sale immediately, becoming the company’s first commercial vehicle as Kiichiro pushed to get something generating cash.

In May 1936, the Japanese Imperial Government enacted a new industrial law that would help create a local car industry and reduce dependence on foreign automobiles. This included requiring licenses to manufacture cars in Japan and raising tariffs on imported parts. In September that year, Toyoda Automatic Loom Works was awarded one of only two vehicle manufacturing licenses in Japan. Nissan was the other. Ford and GM, which had enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the Japanese automobile market for years, found themselves largely ousted from the country within several years.

In July 1936, the car division of Toyoda held a public contest for the best design for a new corporate logo. More than 27,000 submissions were received. The winning entry changed the Japanese spelling from “Toyoda” to “Toyota,” which uses eight brush strokes instead of ten, a number believed to be luckier in Japan, and which, when spoken, has no d and sounds less cluttered. The name “Toyota” also distanced the company from the founder’s family name, which remained unchanged. That October, Toyota was born.

In 1936, Model AA sedans began rolling off the production line at the new plant in Kariya, Japan. This was the car division’s first mass-produced passenger car, built on the same six-cylinder engine that had been reverse-engineered in those early days. In the years that followed, they produced approximately 1,400 of them. In August of the following year, the auto business broke away completely from the loom manufacturer, forming a separate company called Toyota Motor Co., where Risaburo Toyoda, Sakichi’s adopted son-in-law, served as president and Kiichiro Toyoda as vice president.

In November of 1938, Toyota opened a huge new plant in Koromo Town, Japan. Designed under Kiichiro Toyoda and managed by his cousin Eiji Toyoda, the plant combined casting, forging, machining, and assembly under one roof. To avoid having large amounts of money tied up in parts just sitting on a shelf waiting to be used, Kiichiro posted a policy that materials should arrive at each station only in the amount needed that day. He called the policy Just-in-Time. Wartime shortages would soon stop it from actually working.

With Japan’s military forbidding civilian car construction, the Koromo plant was forced to construct only standard army trucks. A lack of steel, wire, and copper meant that wooden cabs, wooden cargo beds, and nonhydraulic brakes were all necessary. Even with some of its supplier base destroyed by Allied bombing, Koromo was left virtually undamaged at the end of the war in August 1945.

By 1947, Kiichiro Toyoda’s engineers were allowed by Allied occupation rules to build small passenger cars again, and they did so with a compact Model SA under the new sub-brand of Toyopet. However, in late 1949, a severe Japanese government anti-inflation policy resulted in a credit squeeze across the country, and vehicle sales evaporated. Toyota fell into such serious debt that it failed to pay its employees’ salaries. It took a consortium of 25 banks to bail out Toyota, in exchange for which it had to reduce the number of employees and restructure.

In response to Toyota’s management plan to eliminate about 1,500 jobs in order to appease its bank creditors, the company’s labor union went on strike, closing the factory for 75 days during the spring of 1950. On June 5, 1950, Kiichiro Toyoda stepped down as president in a voluntary resignation that was typical for a Japanese executive under such circumstances. A former loom-company president took over, and many employees accepted early retirement. Kiichiro would die two years later, without returning to the job.

It was 20 days after the resolution of Toyota’s labor dispute in Japan that the Korean War began on June 25, 1950. In July, the US Army gave Toyota an emergency order for over 4,600 military trucks. The money eliminated Toyota’s debt, prevented the prospect of liquidation, and allowed its new president to begin spending on modern equipment. The struggling enterprise was now afloat.

In 1955, Toyopet Crown became Toyota’s first passenger car designed entirely in Japan, rather than based on a reverse-engineered foreign model. Rival automakers’ models had been designed abroad on the back of European licenses. On the production floor at the Koromo plant, Taiichi Ohno, a Toyota production engineer, created a card-based system which allowed parts to be “pulled” through the plant as they were required, modeled after how supermarket shelves are stocked. Over the next few years, Ohno and Eiji Toyoda, cousin of Kiichiro, merged this system with Sakichi’s original “Jidoka” concept and Kiichiro’s Just-in-Time philosophy. Together, these became what is now known as the Toyota Production System (TPS), and globally as “Lean Manufacturing.”

This content was created with the help of AI.