The Piston Ring

The young man held a small metal ring up to the light. It was a piston ring, the thin band that seals the gap around the piston inside an engine. It looked perfect.

He had made fifty of them, and sent them to the Toyota company to be inspected. Toyota tested every one. Only three were good enough.

Soichiro Honda had put his savings, his energy and many sleepless nights into those rings. Now he knew something hard: he did not understand his own work well enough.

The smell of oil

Soichiro Honda was born on 17 November 1906 in a village near Hamamatsu, in central Japan. His father was a blacksmith who also mended bicycles, and the boy grew up among tools, sparks and grease.

When he was a small child, a motor car came through the village. It was the first he had ever seen. He later remembered running after it, and bending down to smell the oil it had dropped on the road.

He was not a good student. He was restless at a desk, but his hands were clever, and he spent every spare hour around machines.

The apprentice

At fifteen he left home for Tokyo to become an apprentice at a car repair garage called Art Shokai. To his disappointment, his first job there was not fixing cars. He was asked to look after the owner's baby.

He did it, and he watched the mechanics. Over time he was allowed to work on engines, and he turned out to be very good at it.

In 1928, his employer let him open a branch of the garage in Hamamatsu. It did well. Honda was still in his twenties, and he was earning good money. He married Sachi, who would stand beside him through everything that followed.

Back to school

But repairing other people's machines was not enough. He wanted to make something of his own. In the 1930s he started a company to make piston rings.

That was when the failure came. His rings broke, leaked, or did not fit. He worked day and night in the workshop, sometimes sleeping there, and still could not make them right. Toyota's test showed how far he had to go.

So he did something unusual for a business owner. He enrolled at the technical school in Hamamatsu to study metallurgy, the science of metals. He went to the classes that would help him and skipped the ones that would not. He did not take the exams, and he did not get a diploma. He later joked that a diploma was worth less than a cinema ticket.

He also visited steel makers and universities across Japan to learn how the best metals were made. In time, his piston rings were good enough to meet Toyota's standards, and his company began supplying them.

Bombs and an earthquake

Then came the Second World War. His factory was turned over to war production, and he lost many experienced workers. Bombing raids damaged his plants. Then, as the war neared its end, a powerful earthquake shook the region and destroyed one of his factories.

When the war ended, Japan was in ruins. Honda sold what was left of his piston-ring business to Toyota.

He was nearly forty, and he had lost almost everything he had built. For about a year he took a long rest, spending time with friends and thinking about what to do next.

Bicycles with engines

In 1946 he set up a small workshop he called the Honda Technical Research Institute. Japan's roads were full of people on bicycles, and petrol was scarce. Honda found a supply of small engines that the army had used to run radio equipment, and fixed them onto bicycles.

They were noisy and smoky, but they worked, and people lined up to buy them. When the army engines ran out, he designed his own.

In 1948 he founded the Honda Motor Company. The next year he was joined by Takeo Fujisawa, a businessman who took charge of sales and money so that Honda could do what he loved: build engines. In 1958 the company launched a small, sturdy motorcycle called the Super Cub, which was so simple and reliable that it went on to become one of the most-produced motor vehicles in history.

Honda later said that success came from failure and self-reflection, and that most of his work had been failure. He died on 5 August 1991, at the age of eighty-four.

Want to read more?

Sol Sanders's Honda: The Man and His Machines is a lively biography written while Honda was still alive. Tetsuo Sakiya's Honda Motor tells the story of the company and the partnership between Honda and Fujisawa.