Founder of the National Cash Register Company, Patterson was also famous for hiring and later firing Thomas Watson Sr., who went on to become General Manager, then President, of CTR — later renamed IBM. He was born in 1844 near Dayton, Ohio, attended Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1867. After graduation, he worked on his father's farm, collected tolls on the Miami and Erie Canal, and ran a coal yard with his two brothers.
As the general manager of the Southern Coal and Iron Company at Coalton, Ohio, he ran the company store. The books showed that the store should have made a profit of $12,000 a year, but it was actually losing $6,000 per year due to dishonest clerks. After buying two of "Riddy's Incorruptible Cashier" machines from the National Manufacturing Company, Patterson and his brother bought the company in 1884—renaming it "National Cash Register, Inc."
In 1893 he constructed the first "daylight factory" buildings with floor-to-ceiling glass windows that let in light and could be opened to let in fresh air as well. This was in an era when sweatshops were still in operation elsewhere. He hired John Charles Olmsted to landscape the grounds of the National Cash Register Company campus in Dayton, with spacious lawns and colorful plantings. Olmsted also had a hand in designing the residential community surrounding the plant (South Park) as well as a park system for the City of Dayton.
Based on a 16-page handbook written by his brother-in-law, Patterson established the world's first sales training school on the grounds of the NCR factory campus, at Sugar Camp in Dayton, Ohio. He also coined a phrase for his service division which, until about the time the company was bought by AT&T, hung on the wall of every service department in the company. The phrase was, "We Cannot Afford To Have A Single Dissatisfied Customer."
Patterson was also well known for dismissing many people on rather trivial grounds—for example, if they couldn't tell him why the flags happened to be flying that day, or for not riding a horse properly. He was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1979.
