Soichiro Honda
Childhood Of Celebrities : Soichiro Honda
Soichiro Honda was born in Yamahigashi on November 17 1906. His father, Gihei Honda, was the local blacksmith but could turn his hands to most things, including dentistry when the need arose. His mother, Mika, was a weaver.
Honda’s subsequent spirit of adventure and determination to explore the development of new technology had its roots in his childhood. The family was not wealthy, but Gihei Honda instilled into his children the ethic of hard work, and a love of mechanical things. Soichiro soon learned how to whet the blades of farm machinery, and how to make his own toys. A nearby rice mill was powered by a small engine, and the noise fascinated him. He would demand daily that his grandfather take him to watch it in action. At school he got the nickname ‘black nose weasel’, which is less derogatory in Japanese than it sounds in English, because his face was always dirty from helping his father in the forge.
Soichiro Honda’s childhood days are full of examples of technical ingenuity, including using a bicycle pedal rubber to forge his family’s seal on school reports that were less than promising.
The bicycles had another use: those that his father sold from the shop he subsequently opened helped Honda to hone his engineering skills. As he grew, the dream of the car on the country road acted like a magnetic force, drawing him ever closer towards things mechanical. In 1917 a pilot called Art Smith flew into the Wachiyama military airfield to demonstrate his biplane’s aerobatic capabilities. Honda raided the family’s petty cash box, ‘borrowed’ one of his father’s bicycles and rode the 20 kilometers to a place he had never before visited. When he got there he soon realized that the price of admission, let alone a flight, was far beyond his meagre means, but after climbing a tree he watched the plane in motion, and that was enough. When Gihei Honda learned what his son had done to get to the airfield, he was more impressed with his initiative, determination and resilience than he was angry with him for taking the money and the bike.
Credit : Wikipedia
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