Are you REALLY asking this question in 2023?
In 2023?
The world’s MOST FAMOUS factory-robot maker, Fanuc Corp., got its start as a Fujitsu Ltd. spinoff in 1972.
That’s how far you are behind the times.
The post-WW2 period was a fertile period for Japanese engineers. Inspired by U.S. technology and mass-production techniques, the founders of companies such as Honda Motor Co. and Sony Corp. were tinkering with their first products.
The turning point in the career of the late Seiuemon Inaba, the founder of FANUC, came in the early 1950s, when Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers produced the ancestor of today’s computer-controlled industrial machine tools.
In a 1952 article in Scientific American, MIT’s William Pease published what he called “the first account of a milling machine that converts information on punched tape into the contours of a finished part.”
In essence, a rudimentary computer program was telling the machine how to carve up a piece of metal.
The MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory was established at MIT in 1940 under the direction of Gordon S. Brown, then assistant professor of electrical engineering.
The laboratory grew out of the Department of Electrical Engineering’s increasing attention in the fall of 1939 to servomechanisms, specifically fire control (gun-positioning instruments) in response to a request from the U.S. Navy for a special course for naval fire control officers assigned to MIT.
A significant postwar project that began in 1949 and continued and evolved through the 1950s was the work that led to numerical control of machine tools.
Under a contract with the Parsons Company of Michigan, William M. Pease and James O. McDonough designed an experimental numerically-controlled milling machine which received directions through data on punched paper tape.
The first working model of a continuous-path numerically-controlled milling machine was demonstrated in 1952.
The introduction of automated controls revolutionized the machine tool industry.
Far away in Japan, Mr. Inaba realized the concept could be revolutionary.
He later said those early MIT publications were his bible.
In 1956, Fujitsu put him in charge of a small team devoted to the emerging science of programmable machine tools. Thanks in part to government support, it survived nine years without making a profit.
“During that period, you could say our company’s existence had no value,” Mr. Inaba recalled in a 1981 interview with Diamond magazine. But when the market suddenly took off, he said, “it was as if the goddess of fate was smiling at us. Even now, I believe we gained her sympathy with our indomitable spirit.”
The unit earned its independence from Fujitsu in 1972 and Mr. Inaba, the de facto founder, became its president three years later.
The name Fanuc stood for Fuji Automatic Numerical Control.
One of his innovations was to mass produce industrial robots with his own robots—not only an efficient production technique but also an effective sales tool with customers who wanted to see the machines in action.
In 1984, he moved the company from a Tokyo suburb to a plot of hundreds of acres at the base of Mount Fuji. The mountainside location became part of Fanuc’s mystique, as did its symbol color yellow, a feature of its robots, buildings and uniforms.
Whether it was a block of cheese or an Audi sedan, Fanuc found a way to integrate its yellow machines into a production line.
As a result of Mr. Inaba’s efforts, “Japan became one of the leading nations for robotics,” with a 2019 market share of 47%, said Susanne Bieller, general secretary of the International Federation of Robotics.
