Career
Charles Ranlett Flint who had engineered the merger and creation of the Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR) found it difficult to manage and therefore hired Watson as general manager on May 1, 1914 when the company had about 1300 employees. Eleven months later Watson became president of CTR and, within 4 years, doubled its revenues to $9 million. In 1924, he renamed the company International Business Machines. Watson built IBM into such a dominant company that the federal government filed a civil antitrust suit against them in 1952. IBM owned and leased to its customers more than 90 percent of all tabulating machines in the United States at the time. IBM's revenues were $897 million, and the company had 72,500 employees.