On this day in New York · February 14, 1924
CTR Becomes IBM
A tabulator-and-time-clock outfit out of Endicott traded its clunky hyphenated name for one big enough to grow into.
The facts
- Renamed
- February 14, 1924
- From / to
- Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company to International Business Machines Corporation
- Headquarters
- Endicott, New York
- President
- Thomas J. Watson Sr., who had run CTR since March 1915
On February 14, 1924, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, headquartered in Endicott, New York, formally renamed itself International Business Machines Corporation. President Thomas J. Watson Sr., who had run the company since March 1915, had never liked the hyphenated CTR name and wanted something that reached past the narrow world of tabulators and time clocks the company was built from. The name wasn't even new: CTR's Canadian subsidiary had already been using International Business Machines since 1917, seven years before the New York parent caught up. The rebrand was bigger on paper than in practice at first. CTR's individual businesses kept their own names for years, and the unified IBM label didn't actually appear on a product until 1933.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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Watson had never liked the hyphenated title of Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and chose the new name of "International Business Machines Corporation" (IBM) both for its aspirations and to escape the confines of "office appliance".
Wikipedia, "History of IBM", on the February 1924 renaming
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
This is the moment a scrappy tabulator-and-time-clock maker from the Southern Tier started thinking of itself as a global company, and the name stuck through a century of punch cards, mainframes, and now AI, with Big Blue still tracing its roots back to that Endicott address.
Sources
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