Our Own Hall of Fame
THOMAS J. WATSON
PEDDLED PIANOS
Author of THINK slogan Also Helped IBM Coin $$
THE DAYTON DAILY NEWS FEBRUARY 28, 1961
BY MARY ELLEN LYNCH
Daily News Staff Writer
The man who made the slogan “THINK” world famous coined it because, he said, “The expression ‘I didn’t think’ has cost the world millions of dollars.”
Onetime Daytonian Thomas J. Watson took his first job for $6 a week on a Friday the 13th, but apparently he never stopped thinking.
Half a century later, as president of the International Business Machines Corp., he was the third highest salaried man in the United States. (Annual paycheck: $453,440).
With a high school education in Painted Post, N.Y., a year of business school and a stint peddling pianos and sewing machines behind him, Watson went to work for the National Cash Register Co. at its Buffalo sales office in 1895.
THIS TIME he wasn’t guaranteed any salary at all. He worked on commission and he didn’t make a sale for 10 days. But in four years he was leading all the salesmen in the territory and 12 years later he moved into an office in Dayton next to NCR President John H. Patterson.
Watson spent five years here as NCR sales manager and acquired a bride—Jeanette M. Kittredge, whose father was president of the Barney and Smith Car Co.
IN 1914 he left NCR to take over the reins of the little computing machine manufacturing company in Endicott, N.Y., that was to become IBM. Watson took the job for expenses and five per cent of any profits above cash dividends.
The man who was to earn a reputation as the world’s greatest salesman talked a bank into lending him $40,000 with collateral backing. (He later said it was his greatest selling job.)
BY 1929, “Mr. Think” was making $1,000 a day. And IBM was helping revolutionize the world’s clerical work. During the depression Watson refused to retrench; he hired instead of fired, stored what he couldn’t sell against a better day.
Tall and spare, with a canny, kindly Scot’s face, Watson ran his business in an intensely personal way.
He doted on slogans (“Aim High,” “Sell and Serve”) and company spirit. He inaugurated morning community sings for his salesmen. (Sample lyric: “Pack up your troubles, Mr. Watson’s here, and smile, boys, smile!”)
WATSON WAS a passionate internationalist, believed in world peace through world trade and the exchange not only of goods and services but of men and methods, ideas and ideals.
He and his wife traveled almost a million miles over the globe and became friendly with scores of foreign leaders.
President Roosevelt said of him: “I take care of the visiting dignitaries in Washington. I rely on Tom Watson to do it in New York.”
THE SON of a lumber dealer who wanted him to be a lawyer, Watson wore detachable stiff white collars, dark ties, conservative suits. He once chain smoked cigars, quit the way he did everything else: by making up his mind that he would.
For years Watson’s entry in “Who’s Who in America” was the longest of all, but unlike many joiners he worked hard at anything he put his name to. In 1937 he was national president of the Chamber of Commerce.
DURING WORLD War II, IBM manufactured 38 major munitions products in addition to record keeping devices and Watson set a voluntary limit on the profits the company could make from government contracts.
A measure of IBM’s success as it pioneered in data processing, bookkeeping and accounting machines and massive electronic brain computers is this: 100 shares of stock purchased in 1914 for $6,364 was worth $1,206,533 exactly 40 years later.
In 1956, when he was 82, Watson turned over the active leadership of his business to his son, Tom Jr. A month later Thomas J. Watson Sr. was dead of a heart attack. His legacy: a $630 million industrial empire employing 59,000 people.
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