The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), the precursor to IBM, was founded on June 16, 1911. At its beginning, it was a merger of three manufacturing businesses (International Time Recording Company, the Computing Scale Company and the Tabulating Machine Company), a product of the times orchestrated by the financier, Charles Flint.
The companies that merged to form CTR manufactured a wide range of products, including employee time-keeping systems, weighing scales, automatic meat slicers and, most importantly for the development of computers, punched card equipment.
Headquarters then moved to New York, and the company operated factories in Endicott, NY, Dayton, Ohio and a few other cities.
In 1914 Thomas J. Watson, Sr., was named general manager of CTR. Watson emphasized research and engineering, and introduced into the company his famous motto "THINK." Aside from being in day-to-day control of CTR, Watson was also directly responsible for Tabulating Machine. Hollerith’s tabulator emerged as the most promising technology in CTR’s catalog. Before the merger, the machines had been used to conduct population censuses in a variety of countries, including Austria, Canada, Denmark and Russia.
In 1912, the firm’s first full year of operation, CTR earned $541,000 in net profit. Two thirds of that sum came from International Time.
Watson also began expanding overseas—beyond the UK, Canada and Germany where its products were already sold—taking tiny CTR global. When the economy picked up during World War I, CTR’s overall profit began climbing again. International Time and Computing Scale found new markets for their goods in the various war industries,
In 1924, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company adopted the name International Business Machines Corporation.
Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (1911-1924)
