Loom to Line

A village woman weaves at night. Her son, Sakichi Toyoda, grows up to build a loom that stops itself when a thread breaks, the first idea in what became the Toyota Production System. Along the way we test the legends against the records, including who really invented the Type G loom.

Sources

• Toyota Motor, 75 Years of Toyota
• Toyota Industries, Sakichi Toyoda
• Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology, "Sakichi's Aspiration" panel (Japanese)
• Kanagawa Prefectural Library, Kiichiro Toyoda profile (Japanese)
• Taizo Ishida's memoir, as quoted in Kasai and Fujii, Nagoya Gakuin University (Japanese)
• Takahiro Fujimoto, The Evolution of a Manufacturing System at Toyota (Oxford University Press, 1999)

From Kaizumi

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