Jordan Barger

The lovers cigarette holder designed by robert stern in 1954

• be Torakusu Yamaha • the son of a low-ranking samurai astronomer in 19th-century Japan • obsessed with Western machines, you make a living repairing watches and medical equipment • 1887: a local elementary school has a broken American reed organ. Nobody in the small town knows how to fix it. • you take it apart, realize it’s just two broken springs, and easily repair it • but instead of just handing it back, you realize: "If I can fix this, I can build it." • you draw a blueprint of the inside of the organ and build the very first Japanese-made reed organ from scratch • you show it off. People tell you it sounds terrible. • most people would quit. You sling the heavy wooden organ over your shoulder on a bamboo carrying pole. • you physically carry it 160 miles (250 km) on foot, trekking over the brutal Hakone mountains just to reach the Tokyo Music Institute to get real feedback from experts • the professors play it. They tell you the mechanics are brilliant, but the tuning is completely wrong. • you don't get defensive. You stay in Tokyo for a month, sitting in on university music theory lectures, holding a single tuning fork to your ear until you completely master the mathematics of sound frequencies • you walk 160 miles back home • you build a second organ. The professors test it and declare it "as good as those from abroad." • you found Nippon Gakki Co. (which later becomes Yamaha Corporation) • you decide to make your company logo three interlocking tuning forks to remember the pain and discipline of learning music theory from scratch • decades later, your company uses its piano woodworking expertise to build wooden airplane propellers in WWII • after the war, the company uses its new metallurgical expertise from the airplane engines to build motorcycles • you accidentally create a timeline where repairing a broken elementary school organ directly leads to the creation of the Yamaha YZF-R1 superbike • absolute, relentless horizontal integration based purely on figuring out how things work The ultimate testament to reverse-engineering reality.

INBOX: The Nobel Foundation announces the sudden death of Tommaso Debenedetti, who fell out of an open window while running away from his mother, who was chasing him with a rolling pin. (He was 61 and is survived by his mother, who he lived with.)