Hisashige Tanaka (田中 久重) was a Japanese businessman, inventor, mechanical engineer, and rangaku scholar who was prominent during the Bakumatsu and early Meiji period in Japan. In 1875, he founded what became the Toshiba Corporation. He has been called the "Thomas Edison of Japan" or "Karakuri Giemon."[1]
Biography
Tanaka was born in Kurume, Chikugo province (present-day Fukuoka prefecture) as the eldest son of a tortoise shell craftsman. Apprenticed at an early age, he was a gifted artisan. At the age of eight, he invented an inkstone case with a secret lock, which required a cord to be twisted in a certain manner to open it. At the age of 14, he had invented a loom capable of weaving intricate designs into fabric. From age 20 he began to make karakuri puppet dolls, autonomous dolls powered by springs, pneumatics and hydraulics,[2] capable of relatively complex movements, which were much in demand by the aristocrats of Kyoto, daimyō in feudal domains, and by the Shōgun's court in Edo. At age 21, he was performing around the country at festivals with clockwork dolls he constructed himself.