Biography | 豊田喜一郎 Kiichiro Toyoda — He Came to This Oldham Works to Sell a Loom and Left Thinking About Cars

The money that started Toyota is usually described as Sakichi Toyoda's. Both halves of that sentence need work.

Platt Brothers of Oldham was the largest textile machinery maker in the world, and by the late 1920s it was losing the Indian and Chinese markets that had carried Lancashire for a century. Two hundred and five Toyoda Type G automatic looms were already running in Indian weaving sheds.

Platt's response was to buy the patents rather than compete with them. Its officer Chadderton called at the Mitsui Nagoya branch on 7 June 1929 and met Sakichi and Kiichiro together.

Kiichiro was sent to sign. He travelled to Britain by way of the United States, handed the American patent sales to a colleague, and spent his own attention on Ford's plants and on machine tools.

He reached Platt on 21 December 1929 and signed there.

The first correction: the patents were not only his father's. The agreement covered the shuttle-change automatic loom patents that Kiichiro himself had invented.

The second correction is the number everyone repeats. The contract was for £100,000, payable in four annual instalments of £25,000 — but in July 1934 the outstanding £61,500 was renegotiated down to £45,000.

Platt actually paid £83,500. Toyota's own corporate history says so plainly, and almost nothing written in English repeats it.

What stands here now takes care to describe. Hartford Works is the surviving Grade II listed block of Platt's Werneth estate, a mill of about 1850 absorbed into the engineering works and altered in 1909, its name still picked out in white brick below the frieze.

It was listed on 20 April 1988 and remains in partial commercial occupation.

Do not confuse it with Hartford Mill, a separate 1907 building a short distance away that was demolished between 2020 and 2023, its chimney brought down on 1 October 2023. Photographs of that clearance circulate wrongly attached to the Platt story.

The pin marks the surviving building. No source identifies which room in the Platt offices the signature actually happened in, and this memory will not invent one.

Sakichi handed the proceeds to his son for automobile research and died in October 1930. The automotive department opened inside Toyoda Automatic Loom Works at Kariya in September 1933.

Photo: Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.