The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, the precursor to IBM, was founded on June 16, 1911. At its beginning, it was a merger of three manufacturing businesses, a product of the times orchestrated by the financier, Charles Flint. From these humble beginnings sprang the company that Thomas Watson Sr. would mold into a global force in technology, management and culture.
In 1911, bi-planes dotted the air and Ford Model Ts appeared in the streets. Forward-thinking people wired their homes for electricity and installed their first telephones. In a Belfast shipyard, workers were finishing the hull of the biggest passenger ship ever, the Titanic. The booming US economy was creating a new hunger for information. There was a need to keep track, to understand and to inform.
Into that milieu stepped financier Charles Ranlett Flint. He worked out of an office on Broad Street, just off New York’s Wall Street, and invested in shipbuilding, munitions, rubber, starch and the production of caramel. By the early 1900s, Flint had become friends with Theodore Roosevelt, William McKinley, Orville Wright, Andrew Carnegie and other giants of politics and business.
Starting in 1900, Flint attempted to build a number of trusts by merging several small companies to create one dominant player.
One of these trusts was in time clocks—the kind factory workers would punch on the way in and out of work. The clocks helped employers keep track of hours worked and hourly wages. Flint took a number of companies that made recording time clocks, including the time recording business of Bundy Manufacturing in Binghamton, NY, rolled all the companies into one and called it International Time Recording Co. (ITR).
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