Early History of Suzuki - By: James Thompson

Suzuki takes its name from Michio Suzuki who was born in a village called Hamamatsu which is located on the Japanese coast about one hundred miles outside Tokyo in the year 1887. This areas main industry was textiles producing both the textiles and the machinery or looms as they are called that produce the product. Michio learned everything about this trade and also became a master carpenter capable of building looms and looked more at how to improve them rather than just make them. He came up with the idea of using pedal power to drive a loom and in 1909 he started his first small workshop which he called the Suzuki Loom Works to build his new pedal powered loom. His machine was a popular success and he continued to redesign and improve his looms making them the most advanced and well build looms of the time.

By 1920 he made his now well established workshop into a company with the intentions of building looms that were superior in every way to those produced by any other company on the planet and he named it the Suzuki Loom Manufacturing Company. It was this change and the subsequent success over the next two years in setting up a successful export trade that allowed the company to become a world leader in textile machinery and gave a solid foundation from which it could grow and diverse into other products. Michio realized that because his looms were so well built that in order for the company to continue to grow other products would have to be produced. He took a very simplistic approach to this by looking at what the people around him would benefit from most and he concluded that transportation which was both cheap and reliable the biggest problem. He worked on this new venture learning about the engineering required and designed a vehicle but unfortunately it never got off the drawing board as Japan entered World War II.

After the war Japan was in a mess and the Suzuki Loom Manufacturing Company was struggling to survive when in 1951 the cotton market collapsed. By this time Michio’s son was heading the company and he looked back to his father’s idea of providing cheap transport which had even more importance now than when his father first looked at it. He came up with an idea that was cheap and popular to help the transport problem. The bicycle was the most common form of transport in Japan at that time so he designed and patented an engine that could be fitted straight onto a pedal bike. Called the Power Free bicycle it was designed and built in 1952 completely by Suzuki at an affordable price and was built to be reliable and easy to maintain. This was a great success and helped people immensely and also impressed the government who gave him a grant to continue research into motor power. The research and development continued with new designs introduced and in 1953 the Diamond Free engine made Suzuki the winner in the Mount Fuji Hill Climb. The following year saw the company change its name to the Suzuki Motor Company Ltd. They started producing motorcycles with the first called the Colleda closely followed by their first automobile a light car called the Suzilight which produced in a mass production line another new concept for the company. By 1965 they had grown into a worldwide company and expanded into the marine sector producing their first Suzuki outboard motor called the d55 a two stroke 5.5 horse power engine.

Today Suzuki is a world leader in many different fields with production plants found on all continents and is still as dedicated to research and development as the day Michio Suzuki started producing pedal powered looms in 1909.

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