Hisashige Tanaka

Tanaka Hisashige (田中 久重, September 18, 1799 – November 7, 1881) was a Japanese engineer and inventor during the late Edo and Meiji period Japan. He is one of the founders of what later became Toshiba Corporation. He has been called the "Thomas Edison of Japan" or Karakuri Giemon. Tanaka was born in Kurume, Chikugo province (present day Fukuoka prefecture) as the eldest son of a tortoise shell craftsman. A gifted artisan, in his youth he studied t... more

Tanaka Hisashige (田中 久重, September 18, 1799 – November 7, 1881) was a Japanese engineer and inventor during the late Edo and Meiji period Japan. He is one of the founders of what later became Toshiba Corporation. He has been called the "Thomas Edison of Japan" or Karakuri Giemon. Tanaka was born in Kurume, Chikugo province (present day Fukuoka prefecture) as the eldest son of a tortoise shell craftsman. A gifted artisan, in his youth he studied the design and construction of karakuri dolls, mechanical automatons capable of relatively complex movements, which were then much in demand by the aristocrats of Kyoto, daimyō in various 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. In 1834, he relocated to Osaka, where he experiments in pneumatics, hydraulics and various forms of lighting based on rapeseed oil. However, he soon moved on to Kyoto, where he studied rangaku, or western... less