Our Own Hall of Fame

 

JOHN H. PATTERSON

 

NOT AFRAID OF FIGHT

Patterson Saw Winner in Cash Register

Patterson ‘Sold’ Register

 

Dayton Daily News, Feb. 7, 1961

BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH

Daily News Staff Writer

 

     John H. Patterson was to start cash registers jingling all over the world, but he once tallied his own sales on a slate.

     That was when Patterson was making $500 a year as a toll collector on the Miami-Erie canal (with offices at Third and Canal Sts.) and running a coal and wood business on the side.

     The Dartmouth graduate and ex-school teacher branched out and in the ‘80s had a prosperous coal business, plus some mines in Jackson county.  It was in the company store at Coalton that Patterson and the cash register met and began their life-long love affair.

     There was no reason why the store shouldn’t have been making money.  Business was good, bills were paid, competition was nil.  But in three years it lost $3,000.

     About this time Patterson heard about a contraption called a cash register being manufactured in Dayton.

     HE WASN’T afraid of innovation (he had the first business telephone in Dayton) so he installed three registers and in six months—with pilfering stopped--the store was showing a nice profit.

     Patterson and his brother Frank bought out the tottering Dayton cash register firm for a special investment of $15,000 and in 1884, when John H. Patterson was 40, the National Cash Register Co. was born.

     In a drab work room on the second floor of a Fifth St. warehouse, half a dozen workers were turning out four or five registers a week.

     In 1884 merchants kept their money in their pocket or in a cash drawer.

     Patterson’s first sales force was composed of five men charged with introducing a product nobody apparently wanted.

     BUT SOON, thanks to his genius for salesmanship and advertising (in the early days he almost broke himself sending out 18.5 million pieces of direct mail advertising in one year), cash registers were clanging throughout the country.

     In 1888 John Patterson went back to Rubicon farm—to the 2,400 acres on S. Main St. where he had grown up—and the first NCR building was constructed.  It was in the era of the windowless sweat shop, but NCR factories were 80 per cent glass.

     JUST AS HE brought light to factory workers, Patterson brought them a whole unheard-of range of employe benefits.  He saw a woman warming a coffee pot on a radiator and introduced hot meals in factories.

     NCR had one of the nation’s first industrial medical-dental clinics, employes were given rest periods, dining rooms, noon movies, recreation areas and even permission for two baths a week on company time.

     A health faddist himself (Patterson believed in simple food, plenty of exercise, early-to-bed, no liquor or tobacco), he inaugurated compulsory calisthenics classes for desk workers.

     He urged garlic and nuts on his executives and you could get fired for using butter or pepper.

     PATTERSON revolutionized the art of salesmanship.  He believed that good salesmen are made, not born, and he established at NCR the first sales school in the United States.

     Florida faced, sandy haired, and wearing a bristling moustache, Patterson was described as “a little man with a dynamo inside.”

      He wasn’t afraid of a fight and in a day of dog-eat-dog business tactics, there were plenty of them.

     NCR SUED—and beat—countless competitors for patent infringements.

     But in 1912 Patterson and 21 other NCR executives were indicted for criminal conspiracy under the Sherman and trust law (specifically on three counts including conspiracy to retrain trade and create a monopoly).

     On Feb. 13, 1913, they were found guilty and Patterson was fined $5,000 and sentenced to a year in jail.

     While the convictions were being appealed the 1913 flood struck Dayton. John H. Patterson issued an order: “I now declare the NCR temporarily out of commission and proclaim the Citizens Relief committee.”

     NCR BCAME “Sanctuary Hill,” a huge relief station where hundreds fled.

     The factory was set to work turning out boats--one every few minutes—and Patterson ordered bedding, food, medicine and hospital supplies rushed to the plant.  He mobilized doctors, nurses and relief workers.

     He became the hero of the flood.

     Later John H. Patterson was one of those who spearheaded a flood protection program for Dayton (he was also a guiding light in pioneering the city manager form of government here), but when a grateful citizenry asked that he receive a government pardon, Patterson scorned it.

    “ I DO NOT want a pardon,” he said.  “I want simple justice.”

     In 1915 the U. S. Court of Appeals reversed the lower court and sent the conspiracy case back for a new trial.  Eventually, it was dropped completely.

     In 1921 Patterson relinquished the presidency of NCR and became chairman of the board.  A year later he died on a train while bound for a holiday in Atlantic City.  He was 77.

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