Thomas J. Watson Sr.

The fifth child and the only son, born on a farm in the Southern Tier of New York, he failed at almost everything until he was past 22. He taught school for one day. He kept books at a market for six dollars a week, then sold organs and pianos off a wagon for ten, and quit in a fury on working out that commission would have paid 70. In Buffalo he sold sewing machines briefly: by his son's account he celebrated a sale in a saloon, drank too much, and came out to find the horse, buggy and samples gone. They fired him and billed him for the loss. Then a huckster absconded with the money he had raised. Then the butcher shop failed.

An NCR cash register in the failed butcher shop got him in front of the Buffalo branch manager, whom he pestered until he was hired in November 1896. He became the best salesman in the East at 100 dollars a week, then took Rochester on 35 percent commission and in four years made it an NCR monopoly by driving the competitor out of business, sometimes by sabotaging its machines. In 1912 a federal court convicted him, John Patterson and 26 other NCR men under the Sherman Act and sentenced them to a year in prison. The convictions fell on appeal in 1915. By then Charles Flint had hired him to run the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, five firms and 1,300 people. He doubled revenue to nine million dollars in four years and renamed the thing International Business Machines in 1924.

Through the 1930s IBM's German subsidiary, Dehomag, was its most profitable operation abroad, and its punch-card machines tabulated the census that located Germany's Jews. Hitler gave Watson the Order of the German Eagle at the 1937 Berlin congress of the International Chamber of Commerce, where Watson, its president, had set the keynote World Peace Through World Trade. Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust argues Watson personally approved and drove the relationship. Kevin Maney argues he believed, perhaps naively, that the medal honoured his work for world commerce. Both readings are in print. Watson wanted to send the medal back at once, Secretary of State Hull said no, and he returned it in June 1940. After Germany declared war, IBM subsidiaries in occupied Europe kept delivering punch cards to Dehomag, and New York worked through Switzerland to hold legal control.

He gave the company to his son in May 1956 and was dead five weeks later, on June 19, at 82, with IBM at 897 million dollars in revenue and 72,500 employees. Twelve hundred came to the Brick Presbyterian Church, where he had been an elder for 16 years, and he went into Sleepy Hollow. What stuck to his name was a sentence he never said. No speech or document of his contains a world market for maybe five computers, the earliest trace is a German magazine in 1965, and it was called a myth by 1973. THINK outlived him more honestly: IBM trademarked it in 1935, 14 years before its own name, and eventually put it on a laptop.

Thomas J. Watson Sr.'s life against the full span of the corpus.

• International Business Machines company
  The renaming of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company he had run since 1914 1924
• THINK other
  IBM's first U.S. trademark, filed 14 years before the name IBM 1935
• The one percent doctrine other
  Capped IBM profit on military sales to the U.S. government at one percent 1942
• Triple Cities College company
  Land and funding near Binghamton for what became Binghamton University 1946
• IBM World Trade Corporation company
  Built to run the foreign business 1949
• Watson Homestead building
  The family farm and a million dollars given to the Methodist Church 1955

• 1891 aged ~17 Leaves business school in Elmira and takes a bookkeeping job at six dollars a week
• November 1896 aged 22 Hired as a sales apprentice at NCR's Buffalo branch He had pestered the branch manager, John J. Range, through several refusals.
• 1912 aged ~38 Convicted with John Patterson and 26 others of anti-competitive practices Sentenced to a year in prison. Wilson refused a pardon. An appeal court threw it out in 1915.
• April 17, 1913 aged 39 Marries Jeanette Kittredge of a Dayton railroad family
• May 1, 1914 aged 40 Hired to manage the five companies of CTR and their 1,300 employees
• 1924 aged ~50 Renames CTR the International Business Machines Corporation
• 1937 aged ~63 Receives the Order of the German Eagle from Hitler in Berlin He was president of the International Chamber of Commerce, meeting in Germany that year.
• June 1940 aged 66 Sends the medal back
• June 19, 1956 aged 82 Dies in Manhattan at 82 He had handed IBM to his son the previous month.

• Herman Hollerith 1860–1929
  Invented punched-card tabulating machines used in the 1890 census and founded a corporate predecessor of IBM. whose punch-card patents CTR was built on
• Howard Aiken 1900–1973
  Physicist and engineer who designed the Harvard Mark I, an early electromechanical computer. whose Harvard Mark I IBM built
• Henry Ford 1863–1947
  Industrialist who revolutionized manufacturing with the assembly line and made automobiles affordable. the other founder who ruled his company personally
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. called him an unofficial ambassador
• Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969
  34th President and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. whom he installed as president of Columbia