Finance History | 1701 North Street, Endicott — Four Firms Became a Fifth Company

People treat IBM as an Armonk campus that later sat in the Dow.

The holding company that became IBM was incorporated for Endicott.

On 16 June 1911 Charles Ranlett Flint amalgamated four manufacturers into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company.

The four were Bundy Manufacturing, International Time Recording, the Tabulating Machine Company, and the Computing Scale Company of America.

The certificate put the principal business office in the Town of Endicott, Broome County, New York.

Together the firms employed about 1,300 people and made time clocks, scales, slicers, and punched-card tabulators.

International Time Recording had already moved into Harlow Bundy's 1906 brick plant on North Street.

That plant is the ground under this pin at 1701 North Street.

Thomas J. Watson Sr. became president of C-T-R in 1914.

The company took the name International Business Machines on 14 February 1924, a name first used by its Canadian division.

The mechanism is the holding company.

Flint did not invent a computer in Endicott.

He stacked four record-keeping businesses under one New York certificate so the time-clock plant, the scale works, and Herman Hollerith's tabulators could share capital.

The later computer firm grew from that stack, not from a single invention on this street.

Photo: Rosemaryetoufee, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.