Sakichi Toyoda

Toyoda, a carpenter's son, invented power looms and in 1924 an automatic loom that stopped itself when a thread broke, so one worker could watch many machines and faults were caught at once. That principle, building quality checks into the machine, became jidoka, one of the two pillars of the later Toyota Production System. The sale of his loom patents helped fund his son's car company. He died in 1930.