THE REMARKABLE CAREER

OF

JOHN H. PATTERSON

He Makes Workers Happy and Cash Registers for the

Whole World—A Simple Success Recipe

By B. C. Forbes

     John H. Patterson devotes his life to building cash registers and making workers happy.

     Few employers who have made millions have chosen to spend the best part of these millions on their own employees.  Many build themselves palaces, line them with costly pictures and bric-a-brac, spend money lavishly and ostentatiously for their own diversion, doing little for the benefit of anyone but themselves.  Even philanthropically-inclined millionaries have rarely given first consideration to those who helped them to make their riches.  It is more spectacular to build halls, to proclaim large gifts to this or that organization, to strut into the limelight and do something calculated to win plaudits from the public than to do worth-while things inside one’s own factory  and give one’s self to the daily task of brightening the lives of laborers, artisans, stenographers and other unromantic employees.

     John H. Patterson has chosen the more prosaic course.  He has made of a factory and its environment a thing of beauty.  He has put joy into work.  He has made the earning of a living harmonize with the earning of happiness.

PLANT IS A PALACE

     The workshop of the National Cash Register Company, at Dayton, O., is a steel and glass palace flooded with light.  Through its thousands of windows the workers can feast their eyes on exquisite views.  The air throughout all the buildings is changed every fifteen minutes.  Hundreds of shower baths are provided and every worker is allowed to enjoy them in the company’s time.  Of course, there is a hospital with a doctor and trained nurses in attendance; employees receive electric massage treatment free of cost; there are numerous rest rooms for women employees.  To avoid the overcrowding of street cars and elevators and to save the women from having to mingle unceremoniously with the men, the former are allowed to start work half-an-hour after the men and to finish fifteen minutes before them.  At ten every forenoon and three every afternoon recesses are granted the women workers.  The commodious dining rooms furnish midday meals at cost and an orchestra regales the diners with sprightly music.

     Every noon hour a moving picture or other entertainment is provided in a hall which seats 1,250, and here those who bring their own lunches may sit and eat while enjoying the pictures, the music, and occasionally, short talks.  The men are given the privilege of smoking.  By an arrangement with high schools and colleges, vocation training is provided promising youths.

     Not one acre of Mr. Patterson’s extensive estate, Hills and Dales, is reserved for his exclusive use; every square yard of it is thrown wide open to his employees and to the public.  There is not a fence or a locked gate on the whole place.  Instead, it is dotted with quaint, rustic camps where all sorts of paraphernalia are provided free for picnic parties—cooking utensils, tables, benches, even flour and waffle machines and distilled water.

     A golf course, tennis courts, baseball field and other facilities for recreation are provided, while a large clubhouse permits of dances being held on Saturday evenings and all sorts of concerts, lectures and entertainments throughout the week.  There is another club house in the city for the use of employees, and here largely-attended educational classes are held in the winter months.

     Mr. Patterson is a sunshine worshipper. He enjoys nature—enjoys it so much that he wants everyone around him to enjoy it also.

     Any worker who offers a feasible suggestion for improving anything at the factory or elsewhere is rewarded, “Suggestion Boxes” having been in use for many years.

     When he started, over twenty years ago, to treat workers like human beings other employers called him a fool, a fanatic, a socialist, a dreamer.  They warned him that coddling labor would bring him nothing but discontent and disaster, but he contended that unless employers showed the working people greater consideration grave trouble would arise sooner or later.

REVOLUTION

     How he came to adopt the revolutionary plan of co-operating with instead of coercing labor is interesting.

     His action was originally prompted more by business necessity than by sentiment.  Previously he had followed the universal rule of getting from his employees the greatest amount of work for the least amount of money, and they had reciprocated by giving the least amount of work for the greatest amount of money they could obtain.

     Let us first trace briefly the record of John H. Patterson and the making of cash registers before this turning point was reached.

     There were no cash registers when John Henry Patterson was born—December 13, 1844.  His forebears were  Scots-Irish, the first to come to America (about 1728) having been his great grandfather, whose son fought as a colonel in the Revolutionary War, founded the city of Lexington, Ky., became one of the three original owners of the land now covered by Cincinnati, and finally located on a 2,000 acre farm near Dayton.  Here John Henry was born, almost on the spot now occupied by the National Cash Register Company.  As a lad, one of eight children, he had to work hard on the farm.  He received a good education, first in the Dayton schools and later at Miami University and Dartmouth College, where he graduated B. A. in 1867, having previously served in the Civil War as a Hundred Day Man, although then only a stripling.

BEGAN AS TOLL COLLECTOR.

     Farm labor had little attraction for the Bachelor of Arts.  Commerce appealed to him most, but he could not pick and choose jobs.  Collecting tolls on the Miami & Erie Canal, on duty night and day, Sundays and holidays, was the best he could land.  But this was not commerce.  He wanted to buy and sell things.  Having saved a little money, he succeeded in borrowing a little more and set up as a retail coal dealer in Dayton.  From selling coal he gravitated to mining coal and iron ore, in partnership with his brother, Frank, in Jackson County, some eighty miles from Dayton.

     To enable their miners to obtain supplies, the Pattersons, in conjunction with two other mining concerns, opened a store.  Business was plentiful but profits were nil.  At the end of two years the store had not netted a cent notwithstanding that all goods were supposed to be sold on a reasonable margin of profit.  There was a leak somewhere.

     From his militant grandfather, who by profession was a civil engineer, Mr. Patterson had inherited a mania for doing things with scrupulous accuracy and precision; nothing slipshod, nothing faulty, nothing careless could be tolerated.  Everything must be done just-so.  The mysterious mismanagement of the store worried him.  It must be run down and eliminated.

BIRTH OF REGISTER

     Hearing that a merchant in Dayton had invented a contrivance to keep a record of all sales, Mr. Patterson immediately telegraphed for two of the novel machines.  The idea of the cash register had taken birth in 1879, in the brain of Jacob Ritty, a Dayton merchant who, suffering from a breakdown due to overwork and worry in attempting to keep tabs on the details of his business, had started on a voyage to Europe.  While in the engine room of the ship one day, he noticed a device that recorded the number of revolutions of the propeller shaft.  Why not construct a machine that would record each coin put in the till?  Hurrying back, he set to work with his brother, a skilled mechanic, and evolved the first cash register.

     Mr. Patterson’s was the first order filled.  Crude and clumsy though it was, the machine immediately turned the store’s loss into a substantial profit.  Mr. Patterson’s commercial instinct told him that the new invention had unlimited possibilities. “What is good for our store is good for every store in the world,” he told himself.  At the first opportunity he went to Dayton,  investigated the situation thoroughly and, although only a few machines had been turned out, he was so certain of the outlook that in 1884 he bought out the Ritty business and changed the name from the National Manufacturing Company to the National Cash Register Company.

FACTORY WAS UNATTRACTIVE.

     The acorn did not at once grow into an oak.  Troubles and obstacles were met at every turn.  Construction of the cash registers demanded highly skilled and scrupulously careful workmanship of a novel kind.  It was difficult first to teach the workers and then to retain them as their expert services were sought by others.  The factory was located in an unsavory section of Dayton called Slidertown—everybody and everything on the downgrade had a habit of sliding into this section.  To work at “The Cash” did not bring a high social rating; in plain language, the better class of young men and particularly young women preferred to earn a living in more respectable surroundings.

     John H. Patterson was partly to blame for this unsatisfactory state of affairs.  He was not then a model employer.  He was neither better nor worse than other factory owners.  His interest in his employees was confined to what he could get out of them.  And they repaid him in kind.  Poor working conditions begot a poor product.

     So bad, indeed, did things become that in one year $50,000 worth of machines was thrown back on the hands of the company as faulty.

PATTERSON WOKE UP.

     Then John H. Patterson woke up. 

     He experienced not only a change of viewpoint, but he underwent a change of heart.   Adversity taught him humanity.  Why should workers treat him with more consideration than he was treating them?  Why should they interest themselves in his welfare if he was not interested in theirs?  He would adopt a new policy.  Also, he installed his own desk in the center of the factory floor.

     With this new spirit in his heart, he went to the factory to study conditions.  He saw a woman engaged, as he thought, in mixing glue in a very unscientific way.  He spoke to her.  “It’s not glue, it’s coffee,” she told him.  Leavings from the previous day were being reconcocted.

     Mr. Patterson immediately ordered the manager to arrange to have the women supplied with good coffee every day.  He next looked around for other things needing correction.  Not noticing any provisions for the proper serving of the coffee, he summoned the manager, who gave him a dozen reasons why the factory could not be turned into a coffee house.  Mr. Patterson ordered him to rent a house across the street for the purpose.  Again there was delay.  This time the manager and his assistants were told that dismissal would follow were the reform not instituted forthwith.

BEGINS REFORMS

The serving of the coffee had an instantaneous effect upon the output of the women.  Patterson learned that kindness paid in dollars as well as in disposition.  From that day on he never wavered in his determination to improve the lot of his people.  One thoughtful innovation after another was introduced and a systematic effort was made to raise the quality and tone of the working force.

     Better workmanship and better product brought increased business.  Sales increased from a few thousands a year to several score of thousands.  Larger buildings became necessary.  Slidertown had been cleaned up somewhat under Mr. Patterson’s influence, but it was still no Newport or Tuxedo.  Mr. Patterson next bought up much of the property in the neighborhood and resolved to spend both money and time in revolutionizing the whole neighborhood.

     Most important of all, he engaged the leading firm of architects in America to design a factory building which would be the very antithesis of the ordinary factory.  He wanted it to contain every conceivable appointment conductive to the comfort and safety of the workers.  He wanted, also, halls for noonday entertainment, for the holding of classes, for illustrated lessons, and lectures on the different phases of manufacturing the cash register and on salesmanship.

REFORMS BOYS.

     When the glass and steel palace began to be erected Dayton shook its head.  Among other things, Patterson was told that the boys of Slidertown would not leave one whole window overnight, that new glass would cost him more than his profit.  Patterson took the boys in hand and began to transform embryonic gangsters into young gardeners and young gentlemen.  The boys were given individual gardens, received instruction from a head gardener, were shown how to organize themselves into a stock company, were inspired to interest themselves in the work, received prizes and, at the end of the year, were paid dividends from products sold.  The company was run entirely by the boys themselves.  Also, a club was formed to send city lads to work on farms during summer vacations.  This solved the window-breaking problem–and solved, also, problems of more vital importance to the boys and to society.

     Patterson’s “coddling” of labor was bitterly resented by other employers.  They reasoned that the best type of workers would prefer to secure positions with the Cash Register Company.  They also feared that labor would become discontented, not to say obstreperous.  Still he went ahead, convinced he was on the right track and that one day his example would have to be followed.  The more he did for the happiness of those around him the more fun he got out of it.

BANKERS TRY TO GET HIM.

     His enormous new plant, however, was costing him a mint of money.  So were grounds he had bought for the use of his workers and others.  The rapid expansion of his business—in two years he sold as many machines as he had sold in the previous twenty-two years—necessitated the tying up of extensive capital.

     Like a thunderbolt came the announcement from the bankers that he must pay off loans.  Not a dollar could he obtain from any bank in Dayton.  This, Patterson’s critics and enemies chuckled, would put a quietus to his welfare capers.

     It almost did.  Patterson, however, was a born fighter.  He also was a philosopher.  “Thrice is he armed who hath his quarrel just,” he reassured himself.  It was a time of tight money, and outside banks were indifferent or worse. Finally, however, a New England financier sent a representative to Dayton to analyze conditions.  He learned the cause of the trouble and he learned also that the Patterson brothers were men of unimpeachable character, of indefatigable industry, of indomitable will and that they were conducting a growing, profitable business.  All this appealed to him and he offered to lend them several times the amount they had asked.  Had the character of the Pattersons not withstood the searching test, the history of the National Cash Register Company might have ended disastrously.

SLIDERTOWN SPRUCES UP

     Mr. Patterson’s activities on behalf of his employees multiplied.  Slidertown began to blossom.  Besides the boy club gardeners, grown-ups in the neighborhood became so greatly enamored of the beautiful that, under consistent encouragement, they began to spruce up their homes and to surround them with flowers and lawns.

     Mr. Patterson also worked laboriously and against much discouragement to arouse the citizens of Dayton to make of it “ The City Beautiful.”  He threw himself enthusiastically into reforming the administration of  the city then politics-ridden, not to say corrupted.  Like most reformers, he made enemies.

     Nor did he wholly escape the trouble with workers  which other employers had predicted.  During a period of acute labor unrest throughout the country, whisperings began to be heard that a section of the Cash Register workmen were to strike.  Mr. Patterson’s kindness had been misinterpreted as weakness.  Some of the men wanted to become masters of the establishment.  They imagined they could to as they pleased, that Mr. Patterson would submit to anything.  He had made one mistake in the treatment of his workers; some of the privileges, such as taking baths and attending certain of the entertainments provided, were made compulsory.  This form of paternalism, naturally, was resented.  Mr. Patterson, however, saw his mistake and rectified it.

CLOSES FACTORY.

      On learning that a strike was to be called by a part of the workmen, he assembled the whole force, explained that he understood some of them were dissatisfied, told them he himself was not wholly pleased with the way things were going and announced that a rest would probably do them and him good.  He closed the whole works without intimating when they would be reopened and then went traveling.

     At first the prospective strikers were jubilant over their “victory.”  Within a fortnight, however, other classes of employees began to criticise the malcontents.  Another week passed, and still no intimation of re-opening.  Inquires began to be made as to when work would be resumed.  No comforting information was forthcoming.  At the end of a month things began to be made unpleasant for those responsible for the shut-down.  Petitions began to be sent Mr. Patterson to come back and open the gates.  But not until two months had passed did he announce that he would return to Dayton although he let it be known that he had been invited to locate his works at other more convenient points.

     The whole city prepared to give Mr. Patterson a welcome home with brass bands, public receptions, complimentary dinners, and laudatory speeches.  Sober reflection had convinced the citizens that Dayton could not afford to lose Patterson.

     He would have none of their joyful reception.  Instead he replied by outlining a long list of things Dayton citizens ought to do to make their city more attractive, more efficient and more healthy.

LABOR TAUGHT A LESSON.

     He re-opened the works and there was not another murmur of a strike, and since then he has had no trouble with labor.  The true worth of his work for his employees and for Dayton was grasped during the period when there were fears that Dayton would lose both him and his plant, thus emptying thousands of pay envelopes weekly.

     When operations were resumed the demand for National Cash Registers increased enormously.  Mr. Patterson’s system of training salesmen was bearing fruit.  Every employee was filled with ambition to do his or her best.  National Registers, pushed with redoubled energy, were driving others from the field.  The enthusiasm of the salesman sometimes outran their discretion.

     When the national mania for trust busting swept across the land the Government did not overlook the National Cash Register Company.  Was it not rapidly becoming almost a monopoly?  Patterson’s reply to that was that he owned the basic patents for cash registers and that he was entitled to fight competitors both legally and commercially.  Fight them he did without mercy.  Into the rights or wrongs of the Government’s prosecution I cannot here enter.  A lower court sentenced a number of the officers and responsible employees of the company to a year's imprisonment, but this verdict was quashed  by the higher court.  The Government did not drop the matter, but started to prosecute the company under the civil sections of the Sherman Law, and rather than continue at loggerheads with the Administration for another year or two, demoralizing the whole organization, Mr. Patterson was induced to plead guilty to the technical charge of  “conspiring” to build up a monopoly,  a business policy which Mr. Patterson had all along contended he was entitled to follow by reason of his exclusive patent rights.

     Mr. Patterson declared to me that only the consciousness that he was doing constructive work,  and setting an example to other employers in the treatment of workmen impelled him to struggle on against both labor and governmental obstacles after he had all the money he needed for his personal and family requirements.  

THE DAYTON FLOOD

      To the American public the crowning achievement of John H. Patterson was that which won him the title  “The Saviour of Dayton, “ on that memorable day and night of March 25-26, 1913, when the greater part of the city was flood-swept and laid under as much as seventeen feet of water.

     It was Patterson who, hours before the flood came, by telephone, by telegraph, by horseback, by automobile, by foot messenger, by every means of communication that could be impressed, aroused the whole city to its impending danger and gave instructions how to prepare for the coming avalanche of water.  It was Patterson, too, who summoned his executive and other force to Industrial Hall, mounted the stage, and showing his famous pyramidical chart illustrating the organization of the company, announced: “I declare the National Cash Register Company out of commission and I proclaim the Citizens’ Relief Association.”  With a piece of charcoal he sketched a diagram of the Relief Association, naming a head for each division of the work and instructing them how to proceed.

     From the Patterson factory came rafts and boats--constructed of materials taken from his immense lumber yards—at the rate of one every seven minutes.

SAVES MANY LIVES.

     By common assent Patterson became the acknowledged dictator of the whole rescue work.  Never did military general direct forces with more skill, with more rapidity or to more effect.  So brilliantly did he command that when General Wood, commander of the U. S. Army, and Secretary of War Garrison rushed to the scene and viewed the functioning of the Patterson emergency machine they announced: “We can no nothing beyond what you are doing.”

     A faint glimmer of what Dayton underwent may be derived from the fact that in one improvised maternity hospital twenty-nine children were born during that terrible night.

     To describe John H. Patterson’s personality would require pages.  His business methods and his whole mode of life are novel.  His brain works night and day.  At his bedside are pencil and pad on which he commits ideas the instant they enter his head.  To his secretary he dictates dozens of orders every morning to be transmitted to different heads of departments.  These orders are pasted on large charts. One for each department, and not until an instruction has been carried out is a broad red line drawn through it.  By turning the charts, constructed like swinging doors, Mr. Patterson can see at a glance any order that has not been obeyed.  I noticed one without a red line although it dated back several months.  It read: “Make nine hole golf courses into eighteen hole golf course.”  I remarked upon it.

     “That is now being done,” I was informed—an eighteen hold golf course for the use primarily of Mr. Patterson’s employees.

     He is an originator and an admirer of mottoes and his whole plant is hung with placards of wisdom and inspiration.  These are frequently changed.

EATS NO MEAT OR FISH

     Mr. Patterson rises regularly at 7:30, indulges in a glass of hot water for breakfast, works like a battering ram until noon, lunches on some fruit or vegetables, takes a nap for a couple of hours and spends the remainder of the day as his fancy dictates.  For dinner he eats nuts, fruits and vegetables.  For years he has not tasted meat or fish or fowl.  His home is a quaint, unpretentious, old-fashioned, delightful place on the top of a hill overlooking the plant and formerly owned by his ancestors.  He has a grown-up son and daughter.  The former is vice-president of the company, and, until her recent marriage, the daughter had an office at the factory and directed the welfare work of the women’s department.

     Almost singlehandedly John H. Patterson, following the flood, reorganized the civic administration of Dayton.  The City Manager plan instituted there has been notably successful—but how long politics and politicians can be held at arm’s length is a question.  One indisputable fact is that Dayton is now better governed than ever before and that the taxpayers receive larger value for their money.  Mr. Patterson, diplomatically, does not try to dominate or domineer the administration, having learned by experience that able-bodied citizens of a free republic abhor even the most benevolent efforts of that kind.  Nevertheless his influence, his example and his ideals have been a potent factor in elevating the conduct of the city’s affairs.  Indeed he has been the thinker and inspirer in all such activities as industrial welfare, public recreation and co-operative health promotion.  To a seer’s vision he has wedded the qualities of a doer;  his gift of imagination is equaled only by his energy and get-it-doneness.   His inborn masterfulness, at times resented by others in earlier days, has been mellowed by experience.

SUCCESS  RECIPE.

      “I feel,”  he told me,  “that I have only a few more years to live and my main object in life now is to influence others, especially employers, to have more consideration for their workers, for after he has a competence, money can do nothing satisfying for a man’s own wants.  It is useful only in enabling him to do good.  I would rather spend money to bring my fellow beings out into the open, into God’s sunshine, and enable them to enjoy the beauties of nature than hoard great wealth for my children.”

      I cannot even touch upon  the extent of the National Cash Register Company’s business with its branches and agents in every part of the world, except to mention that it employs more than 10,000 people throughout the world, produces some 60,000 machines per annum and has sold more than 1,800,000 registers to merchants in every civilized country in the world.

     I asked Mr. Patterson for some suggestions for the attainment of success, and this is what he laid down:

     “Learn to overcome difficulties while young.  The farm is the best school, for it teaches the fundamentals of success, namely:

     “1.  Hard work.

     “2.  Common sense.

     “3.  Good habits.

     “4.  Practical experience.

     “5.  The value of a dollar.”