Our Own Hall of Fame

 

JOHN Q. SHERMAN

 

HELPED OUT UD

Sherman Built an Industry On Perforated Paper Holes

 

DAYTON DAILY NEWS,   MARCH 3, 1961

BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH

Daily News Staff Writer

 

     John Q. Sherman gambled every penny he had that an industry could be built on the concept of punching hole in paper.  Today the Standard Register Co. (annual sales volume: $55 million) is proof that he won.

     Sherman and Standard Register happened to each other by accident.  In 1912, the 30-year-old Butler county native was operating a fairly successful real estate brokerage office in Dayton.  At the same time, an inventor named Theodore Schirmer hit on a new principle for feeding continuous forms through an autographic register.

     (SUCH A register is used to write sales slips, cash receipts, etc., in long hand and make several carbons.  The trouble was, the carbons had a tendency to slip.  Schirmer reasoned that if holes were punched along both margins of a strip of continuous forms to engage pinwheels, the slipping would stop.)

     But the inventor needed money and in desperation he answered one of Broker Sherman’s newspaper ads under the mistaken impression that Sherman, in addition to buying and selling business for others, advanced money on new ones.

     THAT WAS out of “John Q’s” (the “Q” stood for Quirt) line.  But his searching analytical mind was intrigued with Schirmer’s idea.  So he changed his line.

     Sherman quit real estate, recruited investors and on May 11, 1912, Standard Register was born in a dilapidated second-story room in the old Callahan Power building.  (The National Cash Register Co. had its origins there, too.)

     TWO FLAT bed presses, purchased on credit, and a small machine shop comprised the equipment.  Sherman made the first sale himself—a register, two rolls of carbon and 50,000 forms for $103.85.

     The business was almost an over-night failure.  Three years later it was in receivership when Sherman and his brother, William C., scraped together all the money they could (even borrowing on insurance policies) and bought out the other investors.

     THAT WAS the turning point.  Although he had had little more than a grade school education in his native Excello, Sherman never stopped studying.  A former electrician and molder, he concentrated all of his imagination, initiative and tinkering instinct on the new product.

     Within a year, Standard Register moved to Albany and Campbell Sts., where today it occupies many acres.

     SALES INCREASED five-fold in the next five years as friendly, modest hard-driving Sherman worked in the laboratories and shops side-by-side with his engineering personnel.  At his death, he held hundreds of patents in his own right.

     The ex-real estate man (one of the founders of the Dayton Real Estate board and author of its code of ethics) turned some of his energies to civic work.  In 1928 he spearheaded a they-said-it-couldn’t-be-done $1 million drive for construction of Good Samaritan hospital.  It topped its goal by $14,500.

     IN 1930 self-educated Sherman became a member of the University of Dayton’s associate board of lay trustees, received an honorary doctor of laws degree and was elevated to president of the board in 1937.  UD’s Sherman hall is named in memory of the prominent Catholic layman.

     Sherman died in 1939 at the age of 57.  But the unique product he left behind makes possible today the application of high speed business machines to the myriad record-writing problems of business, industry and government.  Sherman was right about those holes.

 

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