A Legacy of Unique Leadership

Despite its global fame today, Toyota’s origins are truly humble. The Toyoda Automatic Loom Works began operations in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Japan as a way for founder Sakichi Toyoda to sell power weaving looms. Toyoda invented his loom in response to frustration over how long it took his mother and grandmother to complete the mundane cloth making that supplemented the family’s income from his dad’s low-paying carpenter job.

In 1896, Sakichi started with very simple automation of a wood loom by using foot pedals and gravity to move the shuttle of threads back and forth, thus eliminating a large portion of the handwork. Later, he used steam engine technology to automate the wood loom. Eventually the looms evolved to steel construction and, with new automation, ran at startling rates; but quality problems arose when any thread broke. Another major breakthrough came when he developed a device that stopped the loom automatically when a single thread broke, preventing waste from defects. The Type G Automatic Loom of 1924 was a groundbreaking invention that included many new features, such as automatic thread replenishment and automatic shuttle change without stoppi....