Before the robot, fix the loom

In 1924, in a small weaving workshop in Japan, the inventor Sakichi Toyoda built a machine that would quietly reshape modern manufacturing. It was a loom, the Toyoda Type G to be specific, and it could do something no loom had done before: when a single thread broke, it stopped itself. 

That was it. No alarm, no hero operator, no fancy sensor – just a mechanical principle that the machine refused to keep producing flawed cloth. One person could now supervise dozens of looms instead of one. Quality went up. Waste went down. And a new word entered the manufacturing vocabulary: Jidoka – automation with a human touch. 

A century later, most automation programmes have remembered the automation part alright. But they seem to have forgot about the human touch