Thomas J. Watson

Thomas J. Watson
Occupation	Business
Spouse	Jeanette M. Kittredge (m. Apr. 17, 1913)
Children	Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Jane Watson Helen Watson Arthur K. Watson
Parent(s)	George Marshall Watson and Mary Keller Watson

Thomas John Watson, Sr. (February 17, 1874 – June 19, 1956) was the president of International Business Machines (IBM), who oversaw that company's growth into an international force from the 1920s to the 1950s. Watson developed IBM's effective management style and turned it into one of the most effective selling organizations yet seen, based largely around punched card tabulating machines. He was one of the richest men of his time and called the world's greatest salesman when he died and was known as one of America's leading (and self-made) industrialists.[1]

Early life and career

Born on February 17 1874, he was very much the country boy. His father owned a modest lumber business located in Painted Post, 20 miles west of Elmira in northwestern New York State. He himself as a child was something of a loner. An asthmatic, he was remembered as being shy at social gatherings.

Having given up his first job - teaching - after just one day, he took a year's course in accounting and business at the local Miller School of Commerce; finishing in May 1892. His second job as a $6 a week bookkeeper was almost as brief as his first, giving way to a career as a peddler. He joined a travelling salesman, George Cornwell, peddling organs and pianos around the farms, for the local hardware store (William Bronsons). When Cornwell left he continued alone, earning the sum of $10 per week. It was only after two years of this life that he realized he would be earning $70 per week if he were on a commission. The impact of his indignation on making this discovery was such that he upped stakes and moved from his familiar surroundings to the relative metropolis of Buffalo.

He then spent a very brief period selling sewing machines for Wheeler and Wilcox. According to Tom Watson Jr., in his autobiography, "One day my dad went into a roadside saloon to celebrate a sale and had too much to drink. When the bar closed, he found that his entire rig - horse, buggy, and samples - had been stolen. Wheeler and Wilcox fired him and dunned him for the lost property. Word got around, of course, and it took Dad more than a year to find another steady job." As Tom Jr. went on to say "This anecdote never made it into IBM lore, which is too bad, because it would have helped explain Father to the tens of thousands of people who had to follow his rules."

In the meantime, he once more set out on the road selling. In this case his partner was C B Barron, a showman renowned for his disreputable conduct; which Watson, as a lifelong Methodist, deplored. Jointly they peddled shares of the Buffalo Building and Loan. They were soon very successful and with his proceeds Watson set up a butchers shop as an investment. Unfortunately, true to form, Barron absconded with the commission and the loan funds, leaving Watson with no money, no investment (he lost the shop as a result), and no job. Thus for the second, and not the last, time he was fired ([2]).

NCR

Watson had a newly acquired NCR cash register in his butcher shop, for which he had to arrange new repayments. On visiting NCR he determined to join the company; and after a number of abortive attempts he finally succeeded. Led by John Patterson, NCR was then one of the leading selling organizations, and John J. Range, its Buffalo branch manager, became almost a father figure for Watson and was a model for his sales and management style. Certainly in later years, in a 1952 interview, he claimed he learned more from Range than anyone else. But at first he was a poor salesman, until Range took him personally in hand. Then he became the most successful salesman in the East, earning $100 per week. In 1899, at the age of 25, Watson was rewarded with the NCR agency for Rochester, one of NCR's smaller branches. As an agent he got 35% commission. As a result of these techniques which largely revolved around knocking the main competitor (Hallwood) in four years Watson made Rochester effectively an NCR monopoly. As a reward he was called to the NCR head office in Dayton, Ohio, USA ([3]).

Antitrust affair

Watson's role in the scheme of things then was to knock out the competition in the used cash register market. It was made less legal by the chosen means. Using funds allegedly supplied by NCR he set up what was ostensibly a completely independent organization, Watson's Cash Register and Second Hand Exchange, in Manhattan. Undercutting the competition, for he had no need to make a profit (having effectively limitless funds from NCR), he gradually monopolized the business; until he was able to buy out the competitors, which he promptly did. He then moved on to Philadelphia and after that progressed across the country, repeating the operation and covertly establishing another near monopoly for NCR, in the second-hand business, to match that already established in the new machine market.

In 1908, when the second-hand business was merged into the regular sales offices, Watson became assistant sales manager; moving up to become sales manager in 1910 with a further role - working along with NCR's engineers - in new product development.

In terms of the questionable second-hand business, Watson later claimed that he didn't appreciate the implications of what he was doing, and indeed it is quite possible that he was so immersed in the work that he failed to understand the full depth of Patterson's machinations. Nevertheless it was a clear, indeed blatant, breach of the anti‑trust legislation; though until that time such legislation had, in the spirit of the age, been more honored in the breach rather than by adherence. Perhaps he was unlucky, but along with 30 other NCR managers (including Patterson) on 22nd February 1912 he was indicted in an anti‑trust suit instigated by managers previously.

In the six months before his trial he met his wife to be. Jeanette Kittredge. He married her just two weeks after the trial finished on February 13th 1913; having been found guilty and sentenced to a $5,000 fine plus a year in Miami County jail. The jail sentence was unexpected, previously only fines had been imposed; and the sentence was appealed.[4]

Head of IBM

Watson joined the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR) on May 1, 1914. When Watson took over as general manager, the company had fewer than 400 employees. In 1924, he renamed the company International Business Machines. Watson built IBM into such a powerful force that the federal government filed a civil antitrust suit against them in 1952. IBM owned and leased more than 90 percent of all tabulating machines in the United States at the time.

Throughout his life, Watson maintained a deep interest in international relations. He was known as President Roosevelt's un-official Ambassador in NY and often entertained foreign statesman. In 1937 he was elected president of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and at that years biennial congress in Berlin stated the conference keynote to be World Peace Through World Trade. That phrase became the slogan of both the ICC and IBM. He was one of the most prominent businessmen in the Democratic party. Watson served as a trustee of Columbia University, where he engineered the selection of Milton Eisenhower as president. Watson personally approved and spearheaded IBM's strategic technological relationship with the Third Reich. In this relationship, IBM helped make Nazi Germany more efficient as it did its enemies England, Soviet Russia, and the United States where IBM did substantial business as well. In 1937, Watson received the Eagle with Star medal from Germany for the help that IBM subsidiary Dehomag (Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen Gesellschaft mbH) and its punchcard machines provided the Nazi regime for tabulating census data. After the outbreak of The Second World War Watson returned the medal, and the German government took trusteeship of the Dehomag operation, for the duration of the war.

IBM then became more deeply involved in the war effort for the United States, focusing on producing large quantities of data processing equipment for the military and experimenting with analog computers, and his son Tom Watson Jr. joined the Airforce where he would ferry General Follet Bradley who was in charge of all Lend-Lease equipment supplied to the Soviet Union from the United States. Watson also developed the 1% doctrine for war profits which mandated that IBM receive no more than 1% profit from the sales of military equipment to the Pentagon. Watson was one of the few CEO's then (or now) to develop such a policy.

Watson worked with other local leaders to create a college in the Binghamton area, where IBM had major plants. In 1946 IBM provided land and funding for Triple Cities College, an extension of Syracuse University. Eventually it became part of Binghamton University. Its School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is named the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Watson was named chairman emeritus of IBM in 1956. A month before his death, Watson handed over the reins of the company to his oldest son, Thomas J. Watson, Jr.

Personal

Watson married Jeanette Kittredge, from a prominent Dayton, Ohio railroad family, on April 17 1913. They had two sons and two daughters.

1. Thomas J. Watson, Jr., succeeded his father as IBM chairman and later served as Ambassador to the Soviet Union under Jimmy Carter.
2. Jeanette Watson Irwin married businessman John N. Irwin, later Ambassador to France
3. Helen Watson Buckner became an important philanthropist in New York City.
4. Arthur K. Watson served as president of IBM World Trade Corporation and later as Ambassador to France.

As a Democrat (after his criminal indictment by the Taft Administration) Watson was an ardent supporter of Roosevelt. He was considered Roosevelt's strongest supporter in the business community.

The US Supreme Court, in 1936, upheld the lower court decision that IBM, together with Remington, should cease its practice of requiring its customers to buy their cards from it alone. In the event it made little difference because IBM was the only effective supplier to the market; and profits continued undiminished.[5]

As a powerful trustee of Columbia University (June 6 1933–death) Watson played the central role in convincing Dwight D. Eisenhower to become president of the school.

Famous misquote

Although Watson is well known for his alleged 1943 statement: "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers," there is no evidence he ever made it. The author Kevin Maney tried to find the origin of the quote, but has been unable to locate any speeches or documents of Watson's that contain this, nor are the words present in any contemporary articles about IBM. The earliest known citation is from 1986 on Usenet in the signature of a poster from Convex Computer Corporation as "I think there is a world market for about five computers" — Remark attributed to Thomas J. Watson (Chairman of the Board of International Business Machines), 1943.

However, in 1985 the story was discussed on Usenet (in net.misc), without Watson's name being attached. The original discussion has not survived, but an explanation has; it attributes a very similar quote to the Cambridge mathematician Professor Douglas Hartree, around 1951:

I went to see Professor Douglas Hartree, who had built the first differential analyzers in England and had more experience in using these very specialized computers than anyone else. He told me that, in his opinion, all the calculations that would ever be needed in this country could be done on the three digital computers which were then being built — one in Cambridge, one in Teddington, and one in Manchester. No one else, he said, would ever need machines of their own, or would be able to afford to buy them.

(quotation from an article by Lord Bowden; American Scientist vol 58 (1970) pp 43–53); cited on Usenet

The misquote is itself often misquoted, with fifty computers instead of five.

References

• Maney, Kevin (2003). The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson, Sr. and the Making of IBM. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-41463-8 .
• William H. Rodgers. Think; A Biography of the Watsons and IBM (1969).
• Robert Sobel Thomas Watson, Sr.: IBM and the Computer Revolution (1981).
• Richard S. Tedlow. The Watson Dynasty: The Fiery Reign and Troubled Legacy of IBM's Founding Father and Son. (2003)
• Thomas J. Watson. Father, Son & Co.: My Life at IBM and Beyond. (1990)

Footnotes

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. 2001. New York Times bestseller.

External links

• Obituary, NY Times, June 20, 1956 Thomas J. Watson Sr. Is Dead; I.B.M. Board Chairman Was 82
• The IBM Songbook
• IBM biography of Watson

http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/