Biography | 豊田佐吉 Sakichi Toyoda — The Type G Loom Paid for a Company Founded on This Kariya Lot

Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, Ltd. was founded here on 18 November 1926.

The address at incorporation was 2-1 Aza Yuk, Oaza Kuma, Kariya-cho, Hekikai-gun, Aichi — now 2-1 Toyoda-cho, Kariya, still the headquarters of Toyota Industries.

Capital was one million yen, with 250,000 paid in.

Risaburo Toyoda, Sakichi's son-in-law, was president.

Kiichiro Toyoda, his son, was managing director.

Sakichi had finished the non-stop shuttle-change automatic loom, Type G, in 1924 after a harsh trial at the Kariya experimental plant.

Two hundred looms running together produced more than ten times the breakdowns of a twenty-loom bench test.

The team redesigned the shuttle change that summer.

The first production Type G left a small Hioki-cho workshop in Nagoya in November 1925.

By the end of March 1926, Toyoda Boshoku had 240 of them running at Kariya.

By September the count was 520.

Hioki-cho was only about 1,650 square metres.

It could not fill the orders.

Sakichi told Kiichiro to plan a Kariya plant that could make 500 Type G looms a month.

Shareholders of Toyoda Boshoku approved the new company on 26 April 1926.

Construction of the Kariya plant began that July.

Mass production moved here in 1927.

The Type G is the machine British technicians called a magic loom.

One worker could tend dozens of frames because the loom stopped itself when a warp thread broke and changed a shuttle without slowing the beat.

In December 1929 Toyoda transferred the Type G patents to Platt Brothers of Oldham for 100,000 pounds.

That sale is the cash that later accounts say underwrote Kiichiro's car project.

The Platt visit itself is already told on the Kiichiro map.

This pin is the Japanese factory the sale was built on.

Photo: Momotarou2012, Type G automatic loom at the National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons