Business & Finance: The Right Answer

Into the Washington office of the Burroughs Adding Machine Co. one day in 1920 came a job-seeking war veteran from the hills of West Virginia. He was given a questionnaire to fill out. To the question: “Why do you expect to be a success with Burroughs?” 22-year-old John Strider Coleman wrote: “I’ve got to succeed.” He got a job as a $35-a-week junior salesman. Last week he succeeded to the presidency of the $46 million Burroughs company.

Add Figures. Burroughs was founded by an Auburn, N. Y. bank clerk, William Seward Burroughs, who got tired of adding up long columns of figures. In 1881, he went to St. Louis, and with $700 borrowed from a dry-goods merchant he tried to invent an adding machine.

Five years lafer Burroughs thought he had perfected his “Arithometer.” He built 50 machines, but couldn’t sell them: nobody but Burroughs could make them work. After five more years Burroughs perfected his machine. But bankers were not interested. Bank clerks (who could do more than add) were cheap.

In four years, the American Arithometer Co. sold only 1,000 machines. Burroughs died and his successor moved the company to Detroit, for a reason that seemed fantastic to weather-beaten Detroiters. He liked the climate. Sales rose steadily, and by 1941, the Burroughs Adding Machine Co. (the name was changed because the public refused to use the word Arithometer) had branched out to calculators, cash registers, electric typewriters, accounting machines, etc.

When war came, Burroughs got the job of making Navy Norden bombsights and handed it to John Coleman. He worked out a system of mass production (previously believed impossible because of the half-millionth-of-an-inch tolerances). Said Coleman of the famed secret sight: “Its only secret . . . was extreme accuracy in manufacture.”

Coleman did such a bang-up job that when President Alfred J. Doughty retired, there was no competition for his $36,000-a-year job. Now Coleman, who will boss operations (new board chairman Laurence V. Britt will lay down policy), intends to cut out at least 80% of Burroughs’ 400 models, mass-produce the rest. He will have to eat up Burroughs’ big backlog of $63 million in orders. Unlike others, Burroughs has benefited from increased Government regulation and complicated tax laws. They have made figuring machines a No. 1 necessity to businessmen.