a Japanese rangaku scholar, engineer and inventor during the Bakumatsu and early Meiji period in Japan. In 1875 he founded what became the Toshiba Corporation. From age 20 he began to make karakuri dolls, autonomous dolls powered by springs, pneumatics and hydraulics, capable of relatively complex movements, which were much in demand by the aristocrats of Kyoto, daimy? in feudal domains, and by the Sh?gun’s court in Edo. At age 21, he was performing around the country at festivals with clockwork dolls he constructed himself. In 1834, he relocated to Osaka, where he experimented in pneumatics, hydraulics and forms of lighting based on rapeseed oil, including a pocket candlestick and an oil lamp with an air-pressurized fuel pump which proved to be very popular.
