John Patterson, NCR, and the Paternalistic Factory
Near Dayton, Ohio
The National Cash Register Company was founded in Dayton in eighteen eighty-four, when John Henry Patterson and his brother bought a struggling manufacturer of mechanical cash registers and turned it into one of the most aggressive sales operations in American business history. Patterson did not invent the cash register. He invented the sales force.
His methods were studied by companies for generations. He pioneered quotas, territories, sales scripts, and annual conventions that combined motivation with spectacle. He also fired people in memorable ways. One executive returned to the factory to find his desk and office chair in flames on the company lawn. Patterson himself had lit the match.
The NCR campus was built along an enlightened paternalism that mixed genuine reform with tight control. Patterson constructed what he called daylight factories, buildings with floor-to-ceiling glass windows that let in light and air at a time when sweatshops with no ventilation were the norm. He raised wages, built a cafeteria, sponsored exercise programs, and offered medical care. He also dictated what employees should eat, how they should bathe, and how they should spend their time away from work. The line between welfare and surveillance was not always clear.
When the Great Flood of nineteen thirteen inundated downtown Dayton, Patterson converted the NCR factory to an emergency shelter within hours. His workers built nearly three hundred flat-bottomed rescue boats. The factory served two thousand seven hundred fifty meals a day. More than ten thousand people were pulled from the floodwater. Patterson had been reviled in Dayton for his monopoly practices. The flood made him a hero. He died in nineteen twenty-two, still at the company he had remade.
