The paper summarizes fourteen years of toroidal pinch research in the Electrotechnical Laboratory at Ibaraki. The experimental programme started using a screw pinch configuration and continued with a series of reversed-field pinches in quartz and metal tori. The experimental results confirm the existence of, and the possibility to maintain, a quiescent period in the reversed-field pinches. High temperatures (up to 600 eV) found to be proportional to the plasma current have been obtained and maintained, and scaling laws for the plasma resistance and for the energy and particle confinement times have been established.