Watching The Progress Of Casio
Kashio Tadao, founder of the precursor of Casio Watches, the Casio Computer Co., Ltd., was born in 1917 Nankoku City) Japan, in 1917. He and his family moved to Tokyo in 1923, after a major earthquake hit their hometown. Upon his graduation from high school, Tadao became an apprentice to a man who taught him lathe operations, the beginning of his training that finally culminated in the birth of Casio watches.
From there Tadao went on to Japan's Waseda University, although he kept his factory position during this time. Here he learned to make lamps for bicycles as well as pots and pans. In 1946 his newly created Tokyo company, Kashio Seisakujo, started subcontracting gears and parts for microscopes.
His brother Toshio, an inventive admirer of Thomas Edison and an accomplished telecommunications technician, came to work for the firm, where he used his inventive skills to introduce several new things to the company. Some of them, like the finger ring pipe, called Yubiwa, were a little crazy. The pipe turned out to be a popular seller in Japan, however, and the profits realized by its sale were put towards the company's introduction of its brand new calculator, introduced in 1949.
Most of the calculators at that time ran with mechanical gear systems. None of them were electronic. In fact, the most widely used Japanese calculator was operated by hand, using a hand crank and gears. Electric calculators had not made their way to Japan as yet, though they had appeared in other countries. These electric calculators were noisy and offensively shrill, however. Toshio wanted to remove the noise and other issues with the electric calculators and he and his brother set out to create a calculator that ran on a solenoid. This solenoid, an electromagnet, set the stage for an electronic calculator that had no gears.
It wasn't much later that the other two Tadao brothers joined the firm that was to later debut Casio watches. Together they were responsible for introducing the 10 key calculator format that was the precursor of today's pocket calculator.
Casio watches didn't come into being until 1974. Prior to that time, however, and afterwards as well, Casio was responsible for a number of amazing discoveries.
The first clock and calculator combination was premiered in 1976, and 1978 saw the release of the first Casio Mini-card, a calculator the size of a business card. Casio entered the world of music in 1982 when it introduced its Casiotone keyboard. In 1984 the Casio watches line expanded to include a watch with a databank that could store phone numbers.