The Young Man Who Started It All
Sitting at his desk one day in a bank in Upstate New York, a young man looked around and saw a lot of time being wasted.
He decided to do something about it—and the idea that popped into that 25-year-old clerk’s head 122 years ago eventually led to the creation of Nukote.
The young clerk was William Seward Burroughs. He was named after a local celebrity. William Seward had been a popular New York governor who later served in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet and, as Secretary of State, purchased Alaska.
Young William Burroughs hated to see people wasting time. He watched in frustration as accountants and bookkeepers struggled with the monotony of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing by hand. He was appalled at how many hours were wasted correcting errors that the tired bank employees were making.
Burroughs imagined a machine that would handle the drudgery and free people to be more productive.
Ideas for an invention swirled in his head, but Burroughs faced a more immediate problem. His health was poor and the bitterly cold Upstate winters made it worse. His doctor urged young Burroughs to move to a warmer climate. So he packed up and headed to St. Louis—hardly a tropical paradise, but warmer than Rochester, NY.
In St. Louis, young Burroughs perfected his idea for a calculating machine, but needed a place to build it. One day, he met the owner of a machine shop, who felt sorry enough for the young man that he offered space in the shop where Burroughs could work on this invention that he kept talking about. The kindly shop owner even loaned Burroughs an assistant to help out.
In 1885, a couple of years after moving to St. Louis, Burroughs mailed sketches for his mechanical “calculating machine” to the U.S. government.
Three years later, the government awarded him a patent. He persuaded a few local businessmen to put up money and formed the American Arithmometer Company.
Burroughs’ “calculating machine” was a bust. You had to pull a handle to make it work—but the machine would give different answers depending on how hard you pulled! Frustrated, Burroughs went back to the drawing board.
It took him seven agonizing years to come up with an improved machine. But he refused to give up.
It took two years to sell the first 50 machines. Within ten years, the company had sold 1,000 machines. Within 25 years, it had sold a million of them.
The young assistant who the kindly shop owner had “loaned” to Burroughs became president of the company—which was renamed the Burroughs Adding Machine Company...and later, Burroughs Corporation.
The company prospered. Its employees kept coming up with new and better machines as businesses grew bigger and more complicated. Banks were their best customers. The old hand-cranked adding machine evolved into machines that could store numbers on magnetic strips. The company made typewriters, then computers. In 1986, the company split into two parts. One part merged with Sperry Corporation to form Unisys.
The other part of Burroughs Corporation became an independent company called Nukote.
As for William Burroughs, he lived to see his tiny company get off to a good start, but he never saw it grow into a powerhouse. A few years after inventing his calculating machine, ill health forced Burroughs to retire and move to the warm climate of Alabama. He died there a year later at the age of 43.
They brought the young man’s remains back to St. Louis, where he had invented the machine that led to Nukote. On his grave, in Bellefontaine Cemetery, his admirers put up a marker which still can be seen today. It reads: “Erected by his associates as a tribute to his genius.”
Today’s Nukote honors William Burroughs and what he stood for. The inventor’s energy and his fierce desire to help people be more productive live on inside every Nukote employee.
Thanks to the father of our company, Nukote has a heritage and a pedigree that our competitors can’t match. I like to think that somewhere, William Burroughs is proud of us.
With Warm Regards,
John P. Rochon
Chairman
