Founding TDK: turning a university’s world-first ferrite into an industry (1935)

A world-first technology, and the connections that made it an industry

What this founding shows is a company started back to front: seize a material before its market exists, and look for the applications and customers afterwards. While the large manufacturers passed over an invention that did not yet pay, the serial entrepreneur Saito Kenzo staked himself on Kato Yogoro’s ideal of originality, and Tsuda Shingo of Kanegafuchi Spinning put his own personal money into a business entirely outside his own — making viable a venture that sat outside any normal investment calculation. More than the world-first technology itself, it was the human and financial connections that turned it into an industry that carried this company off the ground.

The second thing visible here is the flexibility of a firm that remade its application every time it lost a buyer. Surviving on generator lamps, reaching the market through Matsushita Electric’s adoption, growing as a radio component on the tailwind of the occupation’s superheterodyne order, and then carrying its materials technology across into magnetic tape and capacitors — the sequence shows a company that from very early on refused to cling to a single invention and rebuilt its business as the market moved. The narrow choice to industrialise ferrite became the ground for a culture that would never mind replacing its own principal business.