Soichiro Honda: Toyota rejected his piston rings, so he went back to school
A garage apprentice at 15, he started making piston rings and saw only three in fifty pass Toyota's inspection. He studied engineering part time and came back with rings that worked.
Apprentice mechanic
Soichiro Honda was born in 1906 near Hamamatsu, Japan, the son of a blacksmith who also mended bicycles. At 15 he went to Tokyo as an apprentice at a car repair garage, and later ran its branch in Hamamatsu.
Three out of fifty
In the late 1930s he set up a company to make piston rings. When he sent a batch of fifty to Toyota, only three passed its quality check. Rather than argue, he enrolled part time at the local technical school to learn the metallurgy he was missing.
Bombs and an earthquake
Within a few years he was supplying Toyota and others. The war then brought bombing raids, and an earthquake in 1945 destroyed one of his plants. He sold what was left of the business to Toyota.
What came of it
In 1946 he started again, fitting small engines to bicycles, and founded Honda Motor Company in 1948. The Super Cub motorbike, launched in 1958, became one of the most produced vehicles in the world.
When a customer's inspection failed his work, he treated it as a list of what to learn. Quality checks are feedback, not insults.
Where the facts come from: Honda Global, heritage pages, global.honda; Biography, ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers).
