On this day: Thomas J Watson, father of IBM, was born

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On 17 February 1874, the man who would go on to found the largest industrial research organisation on the planet was born in the tiny town of Campbell, writes Eliot WilsonThe town of Campbell, New ...

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After a year, he joined a friend, George Cornwell, a travelling salesman who sold pianos, organs, sewing machines and caskets around southern Steuben County, and studied his techniques avidly. He now earned $10 a week but realised that on commission he would be earning $70.Get weekly sparky insight and expert commentary on markets, entrepreneurship and innovation from CityAM’s Opinion Editor, delivered every Saturday.","collect":0,"end_time":0,"defaultTopTitle":"cityam.com","property":[],"viewcount":null,"language":"en","relate_stocks":{"LU1778281490.HKD":"HSBC GIF GLOBAL LOWER CARBON EQUITY \"AD\" (HKD) INC","BK4579":"人工智能","BK4588":"碎股","LU1894683264.USD":"AMUNDI FUNDS US EQUITY RESEARCH VALUE \"A2\" (USD) ACC","BK4134":"信息科技咨询与其它服务","LU1585245621.USD":"EASTSPRING INV GLOBAL LOW VOLATILITY EQUITY FUND \"A\" (USD) ACC B","LU1430594728.SGD":"Eastspring Investments - Global Low Volatility Equity AS SGD","LU1894683348.USD":"AMUNDI FUNDS US EQUITY RESEARCH VALUE \"A2\" (USD) INC","LU1674673691.USD":"HSBC GIF GLOBAL LOWER CARBON EQUITY \"AD\" (USD) INC","BK4543":"AI","IBM":"IBM","LU1674673428.USD":"HSBC GIF GLOBAL LOWER CARBON EQUITY \"AC\" (USD) ACC","LU1883839398.USD":"AMUNDI FUNDS INCOME OPPORTUNITIES \"A2\" (USD) ACC","LU1880398554.USD":"AMUNDI FUNDS GLOBAL EQUITY \"A2\" (USD) INC","BK4585":"ETF&股票定投概念","BK4534":"瑞士信贷持仓","BK4533":"AQR资本管理(全球第二大对冲基金)","BK4602":"量子计算概念","BK4575":"芯片概念","LU0321505868.SGD":"Schroder ISF Global Dividend Maximiser A Dis SGD","LU0868494617.USD":"UBS (LUX) EQUITY SICAV - US TOTAL YIELD SUSTAINABLE \"P\" (USD) ACC","LU0321505439.SGD":"Schroder ISF Global Dividend Maximiser A Acc SGD","LU1880398471.USD":"AMUNDI FUNDS GLOBAL EQUITY \"A2\" (USD) ACC","BK4612":"AI芯片","BK4538":"云计算"},"translate_title":"这一天：IBM之父托马斯·J·沃森诞生","themeId":null,"isJumpTheme":false,"ttsUrl":null,"symbols_score_info":{"IBM":1.5},"content_text":"On 17 February 1874, the man who would go on to found the largest industrial research organisation on the planet was born in the tiny town of Campbell, writes Eliot WilsonThe town of Campbell, New York, in the Appalachian Mountains had a population of less than 2,000 in 1874. Thomas John Watson, born this day, was the fifth child and only son of a farmer and lumberman; by the time he was attending the one-room school, he was already working on the family farm, aged five.When Watson died in 1956, he was one of the richest men of his era, leaving an estate worth more than $3.5m. He was not an inventor and no corporate giant bears his name, but it was a rebranding which symbolised his path to success: in 1924, he renamed the manufacturer of record-keeping and measuring systems of which he was president as International Business Machines: IBM.Thomas Watson’s parents wanted their son to be a lawyer, but it held little appeal. He first tried teaching, but a single day in the classroom changed his mind. He then studied accounting and business at the Miller School of Commerce in Elmira, New York, leaving to become a book-keeper on $6 a week at Clarence Risley’s Market, a butcher’s in Painted Post.\n\nPainted Post, where his father farmed, was a village of just under 700 souls, and $6 a week was what schoolteachers, unskilled labourers or farmhands earned. After a year, he joined a friend, George Cornwell, a travelling salesman who sold pianos, organs, sewing machines and caskets around southern Steuben County, and studied his techniques avidly. He now earned $10 a week but realised that on commission he would be earning $70.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFree Thinking - City AM Opinion Newsletter\nGet weekly sparky insight and expert commentary on markets, entrepreneurship and innovation from City AM’s Opinion Editor, delivered every Saturday.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThat realisation was an epiphany. Watson moved to Buffalo, a booming city of a quarter of a million, and went through a number of sales jobs before opening a butcher’s of his own. But these were exceptionally difficult times, and the Depression of 1893-97 was the worst in America’s history. Watson’s business failed, but left one door open for him: he had a mechanical till from Ohio’s National Cash Register Company. While arranging for instalment payments to be taken from the new owner of his shop, Watson pestered the Buffalo branch manager, John J Range, until in 1896 he was hired as a sales assistant.Everything changedIt changed everything. Watson became NCR’s most successful salesman in the Eastern US, honed a ruthless sales strategy and in 1907 was promoted to head office in Dayton, Ohio. In 1912, NCR was found in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and Watson was one of 28 senior figures convicted of illegal anti-competitive sales practices. He was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, but the convictions were overturned three years later on evidential grounds.Fired by NCR and with a prison sentence hanging over him, Watson had been hired as general manager of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in 1914 and was promoted to president after his legal case was resolved. CTR was a holding company overseeing four other manufacturers of record-keeping and measuring systems and a chastened Watson set himself a clear goal: the best machines on the market sold by a motivated and disciplined sales team, acting in an “honest, fair and square way”.\n\nIt worked. CTR’s revenue when Watson took over had been $4.2m; by 1920 it was $16m. Costs were rigorously controlled, long-term customer relationships were nurtured and research and development were prioritised. In 1924, CTR was renamed the International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM. Watson, celebrating his 50th birthday three days after the name change, had truly arrived.Watson may not have been the founder of what became IBM, but he shaped its image, practices and culture just as significantly as if he had been its progenitor. A major opportunity lay ahead of IBM or one of its competitors: it was obvious to Watson that accounting machines would transform the conduct of economic enterprise, yet by 1929 only two per cent of tasks had been widely automated.","kind":"highlight","is_publish_news":true,"is_publish_highlight":false,"is_publish_live":false,"is_publish_wemedia":null,"editions":null,"column":"","sentiment":"0","news_tag":"","news_rank":0,"symbols":[],"gpt_button":0,"need_auth":false,"code":"91000000","status":"200"},"commentList":[],"isCommentEnd":true,"newsSizeData":{"likeSize":0,"commentSize":0,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":0,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false},"APP":{"userAgent":"Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)","isDev":false,"isTTM":true,"tenantId":"TBGLOBAL","deviceId":"web-server-community-laohu8-v3","version":"4.36.2","shortVersion":"4.36.2","platform":"web","vendor":"web","appName":"ttm","isIOS":false,"isAndroid":false,"isTiger":false,"isTHS":false,"isWeiXin":false,"isWeiXinMini":false,"isWeiBo":false,"isQQ":false,"isBaiduSwan":false,"isBaiduBox":false,"isDingTalk":false,"isToutiao":false,"isOnePlus":false,"isHuaWei":false,"isXiaomi":false,"isXiaomiWebView":false,"isOppo":false,"isVivo":false,"isSamsung":false,"isMobile":false},"href":"/m/news/2612459651","isCrawlerRequest":true}