Toyota wasn't first.

But it was them learning a lot from working on looms, and other stuff at textile mills taught them how to max productivity.

Textiles making was already a very competitive industry in late 19th century, and the only way to push forward in productivity after looms were optimized to the max was to cut slack in between machines — management techniques.

There the manufacturers were stealing each other's ideas "within months" as Japan had no enforceable Western style patent system yet.

The electric andon was for example copied from Suzuki looms, where it prevented looms from dethreading when the machine runs out of thread, and requiring hours to manually rethread it again.

Stopping the entire mill for a few minutes to recharge a loom begins to make much more sense when you understand that the alternative is to stop it for hours.

There are many books on the Toyota system, so that they have stolen the show. I have always suspected that other Japanese factories might have also had interesting production systems but only found one book about Honda. How did you know this detail about the electric andon originating at Suzuki? Can you suggest books on this topic?

>There the manufacturers were stealing each other's ideas "within months" as Japan had no enforceable Western style patent system yet. The electric andon was for example copied from Suzuki looms, where it prevented looms from dethreading when the machine runs out of thread, and requiring hours to manually rethread it again.

How horrible! I’m glad the patent system saved us from this backwardness!

Toyota learned it from western consultants, but made it work like a charm. I think they are the real champions of the lean philosophy, kanban, kaizen, 5s, etc.