Introduction

Most people know Epson as the name on their printer. Maybe the one sitting in the corner of the office, or the inkjet that always seems to need a new cartridge. But the story of how Epson came to be is far stranger and more interesting than you might expect. It starts not with printers at all, but with watches. Specifically, it starts in a converted miso storehouse in the mountains of central Japan, in the middle of the Second World War. And the chain of events that led from that storehouse to the printer on your desk passes through the Tokyo Olympics, the personal computer revolution, and the world's first laptop. This is the history of Epson.

A Miso Storehouse in Suwa

On May 18th, 1942, a man named Hisao Yamazaki founded a company called Daiwa Kogyo in the town of Suwa, in the mountainous Nagano prefecture. Yamazaki had been a clock shop owner and a former employee of K. Hattori, the company behind Seiko watches. The Hattori family invested in the venture, and Daiwa Kogyo set up shop in a renovated miso storehouse spanning about 230 square meters. Twenty-two employees began making precision watch parts for a Seiko subsidiary called Daini Seikosha.

Think about that for a second. A warehouse that used to store fermented soybean paste became the birthplace of one of the world's most recognizable electronics brands. The location wasn't random though. Suwa sits in an inland valley surrounded by mountains, with clean air and stable ground, perfect conditions for precision manufacturing. The following year, Daini Seikosha built a proper factory in Suwa, and the partnership deepened.

By 1959, the companies merged into a new entity called Suwa Seikosha. This is the company that would directly evolve into the Epson we know today. But at this point, they were still purely a watch company. Their entire world revolved around gears, springs, and crystals. The transformation that would change everything was still a few years away, and it would be triggered by something nobody at Suwa Seikosha could have predicted.

The Olympics Change Everything

In 1961, Suwa Seikosha created a subsidiary called Shinshu Seiki to supply precision parts for Seiko watches. Nothing remarkable about that. But then the Seiko Group was selected as the official timekeeper for the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, and suddenly everything changed.

Timekeeping at the Olympics isn't just about having accurate clocks. You need to record times, print them out, and distribute results instantly. Seiko needed a printing timer, a device that could take electronic timing data and put it on paper. Nobody had built anything quite like this before, and the task fell to Shinshu Seiki.

The engineers at Shinshu Seiki drew on their watchmaking expertise to build the Crystal Chronometer QC-951, the world's first portable, battery-operated quartz timer accurate to one-thousandth of a second. They also built a printing timer that could output recorded times on paper. Twelve crystal chronometers and several printing timers were deployed across events from cycling to equestrian to rowing.

The Olympics came and went. The timing systems worked beautifully. And then the engineers at Shinshu Seiki had an interesting realization. They had developed a remarkable printing technology, one built on the precision manufacturing skills honed over decades of watchmaking. The motor inside their printer was actually adapted from a motor used in quartz timepieces. And they began to wonder whether this printing technology might have a market of its own.

Son of EP

After four and a half years of development following the Olympics, Shinshu Seiki launched the EP-101 in September 1968. The letters EP stood simply for Electronic Printer, and the device was a marvel of miniaturization. It measured just 164 millimeters wide, 102 millimeters tall, and 135 millimeters deep. It weighed two and a half kilograms. It was the world's first miniature electronic printer, and you can still see one today at the Smithsonian in Washington.

The timing was perfect in a way that nobody could have planned. Electronic desktop calculators were just starting to replace the abacus in Japanese offices, and these calculators needed a way to print their results on paper. The EP-101 was exactly what calculator manufacturers were looking for. Orders poured in. The tiny printer found its way into calculators, adding machines, scientific instruments, and all sorts of equipment. Millions of units were eventually sold worldwide.

In 1975, Shinshu Seiki needed a brand name for the next generation of printers based on the EP-101. Someone came up with a delightfully simple idea. If the EP-101 was the parent, then the next generation was its offspring. Son of EP. EP-son. Epson. The name stuck, and in 1982 Shinshu Seiki officially renamed itself Epson Corporation. Three years later, in 1985, it merged with its parent company Suwa Seikosha to form Seiko Epson Corporation. A watch company's side project had become so successful that it effectively took over.

The Sound of the Eighties

If you were alive in the 1980s and spent any time near a computer, you know the sound. The high-pitched, tortured screech of metal pins hammering thousands of tiny dots onto paper. That was a dot matrix printer, and the one that defined the era was the Epson MX-80.

Before the MX-80, Epson had taken a first stab at the dot matrix market with the TX-80 in 1978, built mainly for the Commodore PET computer. It was cheap but unreliable, and it flopped in America. So Epson went back to the drawing board and spent three years engineering something better. They pioneered disposable print heads, logical bidirectional printing to maximize speed, and better components for durability. The MX-80 launched in October 1980, right as the microcomputer industry was exploding.

The numbers tell the story. Over 200 thousand units sold in 1981 alone. By 1982, the MX-80 held a 60 percent share of the Japanese market and 35 percent in the United States. IBM loved it so much they rebadged it as the IBM 5152 to sell alongside the original IBM PC. Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, reportedly joked that he doubted America would ever bomb Japan as long as they kept making Epson printers. Throughout the 1980s, virtually every piece of software assumed you had an Epson dot matrix printer. It was so dominant that Epson's printer control language, called ESC/P, became the industry standard.

The MX-80 came with a hundred-page manual written by someone who, as one reviewer put it, clearly gave a damn. It included connection guides for popular computers of the day and dozens of programming examples in BASIC. The printer cost a lot to buy but almost nothing to run. A replacement ink ribbon cost the equivalent of about five pounds and lasted a million characters. Even the print head was user-replaceable, meaning the MX-80 could theoretically last forever. PC World later named it the 42nd greatest technology product of all time, and aftermarket ink ribbons for it were still being sold nearly three decades after its release.

The World's First Laptop

While the MX-80 was conquering the printer market, Epson was quietly working on something else entirely. In 1980, an engineer named Yukio Yokozawa at Suwa Seikosha came up with the concept for a portable computer the size of a notebook. The result was the HX-20, unveiled at the COMDEX computer show in Las Vegas in 1981 and released to the public in 1982.

The HX-20 weighed just 1.6 kilograms and had the footprint of an A4 sheet of paper. Epson ran magazine ads showing the computer at actual size across two facing pages, with the headline simply reading "Actual size." The machine had a full keyboard, a tiny LCD screen showing four lines of twenty characters, a built-in dot matrix printer, a microcassette drive for storage, and a battery that lasted up to 50 hours. It was, by any reasonable definition, the world's first notebook computer.

Of course, this being Epson, it naturally came with a built-in printer. As the Smithsonian dryly noted, since it was manufactured by Epson, including a printer was not surprising, even though that was unusual for a computer of this era. A quarter of a million units were sold, and the press hailed it as the fourth revolution in personal computing. But outside Japan, the HX-20 struggled. Software was scarce, and when the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 arrived a year later with a much better screen, the market moved on.

Epson kept making computers for a while. They built the QX-10 for the home market and the Equity line of IBM PC compatibles. They even built clones of the wildly popular NEC PC-9801 for the Japanese market. But by 1996, Epson had pulled out of the international PC market. The company still sells computers in Japan, but it realized its real genius lay elsewhere.

From Pins to Piezo

Through the 1980s, dot matrix printers ruled. But a quieter revolution was brewing. In 1984, Epson released the SQ-2000, its first commercial inkjet printer. The technology was fundamentally different from dot matrix. Instead of hammering pins against a ribbon, inkjet printers sprayed microscopic droplets of ink directly onto paper.

Epson's breakthrough came with a technology called Micro Piezo. Most other inkjet manufacturers, including HP and Canon, used thermal methods. They heated the ink until it formed a bubble that burst and ejected a droplet. Epson took a different approach. They used a piezoelectric crystal in each nozzle, a tiny element that changes shape when you apply an electric current. Flex the crystal, squeeze the ink chamber, fire a droplet. No heat involved.

The advantages were significant. Because the ink wasn't being boiled, Epson could use a wider variety of ink formulations. The piezoelectric method also gave finer control over droplet size and placement. In 1993, Epson released the Stylus 800, the first inkjet printer with Micro Piezo technology. Then in 1994 came the Stylus Color, the world's first 720 dots-per-inch color inkjet printer. Photo-quality printing was suddenly within reach of ordinary consumers.

By 1996, Epson had developed a six-color photo printer. In 1998, one of their color inkjets was even selected by NASA for the STS-95 Space Shuttle mission. The company that started making watch parts in a miso storehouse now had a printer orbiting the Earth.

The Ink Wars

With great ink comes great controversy. Epson's inkjet dominance brought it into one of the technology industry's most persistent consumer battles, the cost of printer ink.

In 2003, a Dutch consumer association with 640 thousand members advised a nationwide boycott of Epson inkjet printers. They alleged that Epson was unfairly charging customers for ink they could never actually use, because significant amounts of ink were left in cartridges that the printer declared empty. It was a public relations nightmare.

Epson fought back with a technical explanation. Their Micro Piezo print heads require ink to remain in the cartridge at all times. If the capping mechanism that protects the nozzles dries out, the heads get clogged, and that means expensive repairs. The residual ink isn't waste. It's protection. The consumer association eventually retracted its boycott call and conceded the point.

But the broader ink price debate never really went away. Printer ink has been famously described as one of the most expensive liquids in the world, ounce for ounce more costly than champagne or even some perfumes. Epson's eventual response was the EcoTank line, introduced in the 2010s. These printers came with large, refillable ink tanks instead of small cartridges, bundled with enough ink to print thousands of pages. It was a fundamental shift in the business model, moving from cheap printers with expensive consumables to more expensive printers with cheap ink.

Much More Than Printers

Here's what surprises most people about Epson. This company that started making watch parts and became synonymous with printers actually does a remarkable number of other things.

They've been making industrial robots since 1980, the same year the MX-80 launched. Their SCARA robots are used in factories worldwide for assembly, packaging, and semiconductor handling. Epson robots assemble watches, build printers, and package the chips that go inside both.

They still make watches. In fact, they manufacture some of the finest Seiko timepieces, including Spring Drive models and high-end Grand Seiko pieces, at their Micro Artist Studio inside the Shiojiri plant. They also own Orient Watch, one of Japan's heritage watchmaking brands, which they acquired fully in 2009. The connection to their founding in that Suwa miso storehouse remains unbroken.

They build projectors. In 1996, Epson revolutionized the projection market with the ELP-3000, a compact, high-brightness projector that made data projection practical for ordinary business meetings. Today they're one of the largest projector manufacturers in the world.

They even made a camera. In 2004, the Epson R-D1 became the first digital rangefinder camera on the market, compatible with classic Leica lenses. It was a quirky, beautiful product that attracted a devoted following among photography enthusiasts.

And they produce semiconductors, crystal oscillators, and LCD panels. The company's quartz crystal expertise, originally developed for watches, now feeds into everything from smartphones to industrial sensors.

Epson Today

Seiko Epson Corporation today is a company with over 75 thousand employees and annual revenue of roughly 1.36 trillion yen, which is about 9 billion US dollars. That makes it several times larger than the Seiko Group itself in terms of revenue. The child has long since outgrown the parent. The Hattori family and Seiko Group still hold about ten percent of Epson's shares, but the company has been fully independent for decades.

The company is headquartered where it all began, in Suwa, Nagano. Not in Tokyo, not in some gleaming corporate district, but in the mountain town where Hisao Yamazaki set up shop in his miso storehouse. Since 2017, Epson has been a constituent of Japan's Nikkei Stock Average index.

Their current corporate vision focuses heavily on environmental sustainability. Epson aims to be carbon negative and completely free of underground resources by 2050. They've committed 100 billion yen over ten years to decarbonization and recycling technologies. In 2022, they became the first manufacturing company to switch to 100 percent renewable electricity at all their sites in Japan.

The printer business remains the core, but it's evolving. The EcoTank refillable ink system continues to grow. Enterprise inkjet solutions are replacing lasers in offices. And the company is pushing into industrial printing, including digital textile printing and commercial label printing with their SurePress line.

Conclusion

The story of Epson is really three stories woven together. It's a story about precision, about how skills developed making watch gears in a mountain valley turned out to be exactly what the world needed when it wanted to put words on paper and images on screens. It's a story about happy accidents, about how a timing device for the Olympics accidentally created a printing empire. And it's a story about names, about how a clever bit of wordplay turned the son of an electronic printer into one of the most recognized technology brands on the planet.

From a 22-person miso storehouse to a company with 75 thousand employees. From timing Olympic races to printing documents in space. From the screeching glory of the MX-80 to the quiet precision of a modern EcoTank. That's a journey worth knowing about the next time you hit print.