This idea was radical on two counts. It was radical technically because, all told, there were probably only a dozen computers in existence, and with the exception of Eckert and Mauchly, most designers were still thinking in terms of one-of-a-kind machines. And it was radical financially because Birkenstock and Hurd wanted us to pay for the design ourselves. Birkenstock pointed out that if we accepted taxpayer money, we’d have to turn over so much information to the government that we’d never have a solid patent position.
“How much is this going to cost?” I said.
“For the design and a prototype, three million dollars,” he said. “For the whole program, three or four times that.”
What he was talking about was by far the most expensive project in IBM history: ten times the size of Dad’s SSEC. I asked to hear more about the machine and shortly after New Year’s Day 1951 we held a meeting in my office. Williams and I were the only nontechnical men there. Hurd, Palmer, and Birkenstock put their briefcases on the table and took out diagrams of the new computer—a confusing bunch of black boxes connected by lines. After years of pushing, I’d finally come to the moment of truth. We had the money, and I knew I could justify the project to Dad and the other executives simply by saying it was vital to the war effort. I didn’t want to ask the advice of our sales or market research people, because they’d howl the minute they saw what we wanted to do. And it was not a decision that I could discuss in any detail with Dad—I only had a rudimentary understanding myself and would never be able to answer the questions he was sure to raise. So I was on my own. I had a roomful of talented technical men who were enthusiastic and wanted to try, but it was a three-million-dollar gamble—a sum as big as IBM’s entire research budget two years before. So I said to Birkenstock, “Let’s go ahead. But I’d like you to do me a favor. Take these plans, clean them up, and you and Hurd go out and see whether we can get any orders for this machine.” Meanwhile, to ward off skeptics from the sales staff, we gave our new computer a patriotic name: the Defense Calculator.
Before Birkenstock and Hurd could leave on their selling trip we had to decide what the computer was going to cost customers. Nobody at IBM knew how to put a price on a computer. So Palmer and his men figured out how much we’d have to pay for the vacuum tubes, boosted that by 50 percent, and came out with a rental rate of eight thousand dollars a month. Then Birkenstock and Hurd went around to all the defense laboratories they’d visited before and made a sales pitch that emphasized the new things the Defense Calculator would make possible. Customers jumped at the idea; in less than two months, we found eleven takers for the Defense Calculator and ten more prospective ones. With orders in hand, Williams and I presented the project to Dad, who approved it without a single question.
Many people had the impression that my father and I never agreed on the subject of electronics. There was that single instance when he called the vice president of engineering in, but oddly, except for that, electronics was the only major issue on which we didn’t fight. I like to think that if I hadn’t been around to push, Dad would have eventually put IBM into electronics anyway, because he loved calculating speed. Before the Defense Calculator ever came up, Dad visited a laboratory he’d endowed at Columbia University where researchers were experimenting with high-speed circuits. He stopped off at my office when he came back and I could see how excited he was. He said, “You ought to go up there and see that. I don’t know what it was, but the fellow was doing it two hundred thousand times a second!” But as things worked out, I think Dad decided the electronics opportunity should be mine, and the Defense Calculator was the first big risk he let me take as an executive.
Once the project got under way, the idea of putting out an electronic computer captured my imagination more than I thought business ever could. I thought of the Defense Calculator project as being similar to what the Wright brothers had done. They wanted to fly, and there were dozens of obstacles that stood in their way. They had the problem of power, and the problem of how to make a wing that would lift, and the problem of how to control the wing. They had the problem of how to take off. They had to build efficient propellers, and when they tried to model them on boat propellers, they found out that was no good; there was no comparison between water and air. Each of these problems was a discrete and different issue, and if they’d failed at any of them they’d never have flown. And yet those two men, along with one assistant from their bicycle shop, solved every one of those problems in the space of about seven years.
The problems we faced were just as complicated, though we had hundreds more men and much more money to work with. We were moving away from the punch card, a relatively slow medium that we understood very well, to something a hundred times faster that we didn’t understand. We were trying to develop logic circuits, memory circuits, tape-handling devices, recording heads, card-to-tape data transfer techniques, and, in conjunction with other manufacturers, vacuum tubes and tapes themselves. Palmer’s laboratory overflowed the old mansion and into another building, a onetime pickle factory that stood on our land along the Hudson River. We made that our lab for vacuum tube and circuit research, while all the magnetic tape work was done in the original house. We were essentially learning a whole new trade.
To me it was wonderful and amazing. You only had to visit Poughkeepsie to get a sense of the fundamental change taking place in engineering. Our laboratory back in Endicott had always felt to me like a stuffy museum—a place where ideas were scarce and had to be jealously guarded and preserved. But Poughkeepsie was wide open—the ideas seemed as abundant as air, and you had the impression of a limitless future. The old Endicott inventors worked in isolation from one another; in Poughkeepsie everybody believed that collaboration was the only way to move a complicated electronics project along. There was tremendous imagination and inventiveness everywhere you looked. I remember walking into the mansion one day and finding a Hoover vacuum cleaner rigged to the base of one of the magnetic tape machines. I asked the engineer, James Weidenhammer, what he was doing. He told me he had an idea for using suction to keep slack tape from getting tangled. It was a very clever concept, and to this day all high-speed tape drives are patterned after it.
The further the Defense Calculator progressed, the more the rest of IBM got involved. The project won some important allies, including Red LaMotte, who by now had become vice president of sales, and Vin Learson, who was sales manager of the punch-card division. I kept waiting for Dad to second-guess me on the machine, but he never did. Instead, Dad publicly blessed the project when it reached its halfway mark. He announced to shareholders at the annual meeting in April 1952 that IBM was building an electronic machine, “twenty-five times faster than the SSEC,” that was going to be rented and serviced along with our regular products. He gave it a number, the IBM 701, just like our other products, instead of calling it the TOMMIAC or some such, which I was grateful for. I’m sure he must have had his doubts. In March he had come up to Poughkeepsie with the whole board of directors to see the Defense Calculator prototype. One of the engineers presenting the machine got carried away and said that the future belonged to electronic computing. I was later told that Dad looked upset at the emphasis being given to computers. But he never mentioned it to me. A year earlier he’d have said, “Hasn’t anyone told that young man that this company’s future is still in IBM cards?” I think he was making a conscious effort to let me and my machine have our day.
Dad was in his mid-seventies and slowing down. He started coming to work later and later in the morning, and after lunch he’d take a nap for an hour or two on the couch in the anteroom next to his office, where he kept a blanket to put over himself. The secretaries kept this secret, because Dad liked to project an image of absolute vigor. When he appeared in public, he was the consummate actor: even if he didn’t feel well he’d pull himself up and stride like a man thirty years younger. Sometimes he actually seemed to draw energy from working. We’d be at a conference and he’d tell me he was dead
tired and going to lie down. But on his way to the elevator he’d run into somebody he hadn’t seen in a long time and they’d start discussing business. Dad would talk for twenty minutes on his feet and apparently be completely refreshed by it.
But I knew he wasn’t as strong as before and I started being protective of him. When we traveled on a train together, I’d always go check on him if I woke up in the middle of the night. I remember once, on a trip from Indiana to Washington, I looked in on him and he wasn’t there. So I put on my clothes and started searching. I found him walking through the train fully dressed in a business suit and tie. I said, “Are you all right, Dad?”
“Yes. I had a peculiar feeling, so I thought I’d take a walk. But I’m all right.”
Probably he’d woken up and thought he was going to die. I now know that is a feeling all old people sometimes have—you wake up with a start and wonder if your time has come. He just needed to walk it off.
In 1950 I went with him to a dinner one night and he made a poor speech. The Masons were giving him an award at the Biltmore Hotel and all he did in preparation was scribble a few ideas. He thought he could just wing it, but at age seventy-six, you can’t. I watched him fumbling with his notes and felt embarrassed for him. Afterward he asked me, “How was it?”
I said, “It was fine, Dad. But, you know, giving speeches takes too much out of you. You really shouldn’t be doing it very much.” I told him that he was of a stature in business where he could limit himself to making two or three minutes of observations instead of a full address. After that I did what I could to keep him from getting in a bind in public. When it came time for our next annual meeting, I got it across to him that if there was going to be flak in the form of questions from professional gadflies, I ought to take it. Dad was perfectly agreeable: he realized he was a little less able. In private he still wanted very much to be boss, but each year he let me run a little more of the annual meeting.
I never thought to myself, “When is this old gink going to quit?” I remember at one point George Phillips said, “You know, Tom, your father is seventy-seven. He’s past the age when most people drop from heart attacks and cancer. If those things were going to get him, they’d have gotten him by now. He may end up living quite a while.” I thought, “Gee, wouldn’t that be great?” I had no feeling of “Oh, God, if he hangs on that long I’ll die.” Most of the time my life was enriched by him, because I could now give my aging father some help and be appreciated for it. Only when things between us got especially rough would I go home to Olive and say, “I wish Dad would get the hell out.” Mainly I wanted him there. I later had a good friend on the IBM board, Maersk Moller, who had to operate under almost the same conditions with his old man. His father had founded one of the world’s great shipping companies, A. P. Moller, Inc. of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Maersk was supposed to succeed him. Old Mr. Moller was about ninety, and he’d go into the hospital because he was getting weaker and weaker. But then he’d jump up out of bed, come down to the office, and countermand all the orders Maersk had given. Maersk’s wife once told me that if Mr. Moller had lived another few years, Maersk would have been the one in the hospital instead. But Maersk tolerated it because he had the same dogged devotion to his old man as I did to mine.
I wish that my relationship with Dad had been such that I could have gone into his office, put my feet up, and shared thoughts with him about the future of IBM. By about 1950 I thought I’d learned the business. I understood what we were doing, had the confidence of Williams and the other young men, and knew where I wanted IBM to go. But Dad wasn’t finished with me yet. I was still only executive vice president, and he made it pretty clear that if I wanted more responsibility I was going to have to keep fighting him for it every step of the way. Once when I complained of his rough treatment Dad growled, “I don’t have a lot of time to teach you and I’m doing it the only way I know how.” He was determined not to stop until he had tested me, tempered me, and forged me in his image.
Dad and I would usually meet toward the end of the day, after I had been working tremendously hard. He’d only really get going around five o’clock at night, which was the time I’d want to catch my train to Greenwich. But the buzzer would buzz and there I’d be, fagged, and Dad would say, “I’m going to send Farwell to Kalamazoo,” which would be exactly the opposite of what we’d agreed on the day before.
I’d say, “Dad, you know, we really talked that through and we decided it wasn’t a very good thing to send Farwell to Kalamazoo.”
“Well, I’ve thought about it further and I’ve changed my mind.”
“But I already told Farwell that—”
“You shouldn’t have done that!” he’d say, and we’d be off to the races.
Our worst fights were not at the office, where outsiders might hear, but at my parents’ townhouse on East Seventy-fifth Street. If I had a late dinner in the city, or early meetings scheduled for the next day, I’d sometimes stay overnight with them rather than commute home to Greenwich. I’d sleep in the same bedroom that I had before the war. Looking back now, I’m not sure why I kept doing that. To my father, that opulent house represented everything he had ever aspired to in life; for me it just brought back memories of the unhappy years I lived there as an IBM salesman.
Often my parents would still be out at some social event, but I had a key and I’d let myself in. In her frugal way, Mother kept no nighttime help, and all the lights would be off except for a dim ten-watt bulb in the foyer. So I’d turn some lights on. There was a winding staircase of beautiful marble, and along the walls were large oil paintings of the kind Dad loved—dark landscapes with tired cows. The second floor had a tremendous living room with paneled walls, big armchairs with maroon upholstery, and of course Persian rugs. Every inch of table space was covered with family pictures and photographs of world leaders inscribed to Dad. Pictures of FDR and Churchill had the place of honor on the mantel.
My room was one more flight up. It was comfortable but spare; it looked like an ordinary guest room. I’d go straight to bed, and by the time Mother and Dad came home from their dinner party, I’d be asleep. Dad would wake me up under the guise of saying good night. He’d sit down on the chair by the bed, ask how I was, and after a few pleasantries he’d say, “By the way, son, I just want to cover that matter of the Western sales region once more.”
It never made any difference that this might be something I’d worked on over a long period and just gotten resolved. “I’m not at all satisfied with the way it’s being handled,” he’d say, and there would go the whole wall that I’d laboriously put up brick by brick by brick, right down in my face. I loved the old boy and he knew it, but I didn’t have the energy or time to rebuild walls he mashed down. I’d come out of a deep sleep and be in the middle of a battle in no time.
The best strategy would have been to let him blow himself out. Maybe if it had been 9:00 A.M. and I’d just come back from a week’s vacation, I’d have been able to say, “Let me take another look at it.” But usually I would come back at him hard, and we’d be in one hellacious fight. He’d get livid. His jowls would shake. All the old family tensions would come boiling out, and I’d let him have it with everything I had.
My mother would hear our enraged voices—“Now let me tell you something!” “Don’t talk like that to me!” It would be 1:30 in the morning, and finally she’d get up from bed. I can remember her standing in the doorway in her nightdress, with her hair unbrushed because she’d been asleep. She never took sides. She’d say, “Can’t you boys just go to sleep?”
It would frequently end in tears. Then Dad and I would hug—and go to bed frustrated. We’d swear we’d never do it again, and within two or three weeks there would be another moment of difference which would escalate into another white-hot argument. It amazes me that two people could torture each other to the degree Dad and I did and not call it quits. I remember once we had an awful battle in my office and I ran out of the room. Down the co
rridor was the office of a distant cousin of Dad’s named Charley Love. I made it as far as Charley Love’s door, threw myself on his divan, and sobbed, while Charley sat there at his desk. It must have been a shock, but he was a sensitive guy and asked what was the matter.
“Charley, did you have terrible fights with your father when you were growing up?”
He said, “Of course.” It was very reassuring.
Dad was constantly trying to change me, and I was trying to change him. I wanted an easy old-shoe pal and he couldn’t be that. He’d have liked me to be more pliant and defy him less. Each of us wanted something that the other couldn’t give. Mother did what she could to calm things down; sometimes she’d talk to me privately about it. She’d say, “I’m enough younger than your father to know he is difficult. I also know that you have to say yes to him on almost everything. But you’ve got to remember, he’s a very old man. It’s probably not good for him to get worked up and blue in the face. You’d feel terrible if anything happened to him while you were having one of those big battles. I don’t know how they get started or what you can do to slow him down, but please do as much as you can. Try to moderate it.”
In truth there wasn’t much I could do, which is why those fights were so deeply disturbing. They were savage, primal, and unstoppable. My father loved me and wanted me to thrive; I loved him and wanted to see him live his life without trauma, without embarrassment, without strain to his health. But while I always tried to live up to his expectations, he was never satisfied, because no son can ever totally please his father. And when he criticized me I found it impossible to hold back my rage.
By that time I had very little doubt about my ability to manage IBM. I was much more concerned about whether I’d be able to manage Dad. Most of our business differences stemmed from the fact that I had a better feel than he did for IBM’s increasing size. Our business was exploding. When I came back from the war, it was $140 million a year, and by 1952 it had more than doubled. Dad was constantly torn between the huge numbers we were beginning to deal with and the way he had managed the little cash-register company when his boss Mr. Patterson was away. He’d call me to his office and say, “You and Al Williams are really mismanaging the sales operation.” I’d ask what he meant, and he’d say that the only way to keep track of the business was for branch and district managers to read the call reports. A call report was the write-up a salesman would hand in after meeting with a prospect. Dad had read all of the call reports when he was a regional manager at the Cash. So I’d have to explain that he was asking the impossible: our salesmen were averaging four calls a day, and in a bigger office we had forty salesmen; in a sales district there would be close to four thousand reports a day. If a manager read them, he wouldn’t have time for anything else. “This is a big company now, with big-company problems!” I kept telling Dad.
Father, Son & Co. Page 24
