Japan’s first air micrometer, and the shift from cutting tools to measurement (1953)

What it means for the thing you sell to change places

Read the industrialization of the air micrometer as the successful development of a new technology and you mistake the character of the decision. For a cutting-tool maker, a measuring instrument was properly a device for checking the dimensions it had itself cut — not something to sell outside. Tokyo Seimitsu Kogu finished its prototype in October 1952 and put it on the market in January 1953. The core of the decision lies in that inversion of an inspection tool into a product, and the plainest evidence of where it led is that in April 1962 the two characters for “tools” fell out of the company’s name.

That said, the change of what the company sold took a long time. Five years passed between going to market and the industrialization of the electric micrometer, and nine before the name changed. In the interval the presidency changed hands twice, so it strains the record to cast this as one manager’s conception. A main product is replaced not by proclamation but when the line set down beside it accumulates until it overtakes the old one. The company’s 1953 can be read as the year that overtaking began.