In a census, for instance, a single card, about three inches by seven inches, could be punched with holes that form an information portrait of a person-city of residence, age, nationality, job and more. Not only could the machines count faster, but they could understand information in new ways. Before the merger, the machines had been used to conduct population censuses in a variety of countries, including Austria, Canada, Denmark and Russia. Very quickly, Hollerith’s tabulator emerged as the most promising technology in C-T-R’s catalog. Headquarters moved to New York, and the company operated factories in Endicott, NY, Dayton, Ohio and a few other cities. The new information-based entity was named the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, or C-T-R. with Computing Scale, ITR and what remained of the Bundy Manufacturing Co. In 1911, Flint bought out Hollerith, and then merged the Tabulating Machine Co. It sorted and counted information recorded by punching holes in cards, and Hollerith had begun selling the machines to governments, railroad companies and retailers. Hollerith had built the tabulating machine to count the 1890 US Census. He was also at the time becoming interested in another information-based company, Herman Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Co., based in Washington, DC. Flint, searching for a way to help the companies, realized that both were, at their core, about collecting, quantifying and analyzing information-a mission that would actually be the mainstay of the company through the next century. Through the early 1900s, ITR grew modestly and Computing Scale struggled. 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.
The clocks helped employers keep track of hours worked and hourly wages. One of these trusts was in time clocks-the kind factory workers would punch on the way in and out of work. Starting in 1900, Flint attempted to build a number of trusts by merging several small companies to create one dominant player. By the early 1900s, Flint had become friends with Theodore Roosevelt, William McKinley, Orville Wright, Andrew Carnegie and other giants of politics and business.
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. Into that milieu stepped financier Charles Ranlett Flint. There was a need to keep track, to understand and to inform.
The booming US economy was creating a new hunger for information. In a Belfast shipyard, workers were finishing the hull of the biggest passenger ship ever, the Forward-thinking people wired their homes for electricity and installed their first telephones. In 1911, biplanes dotted the air and Ford Model Ts appeared in the streets.
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