Patterson, John Henry

(1844– 1922), an industrialist and the founder of NCR. In 1893, he constructed the first ‘daylight factory’; a building with floor-to-ceiling windows that let in light and could be opened to let in fresh air as well. Patterson was famous for firing Henry Watson, who would later become President of IBM. So many prominent businessmen were trained and fired by Patterson that some business historians regarded experience at NCR as the rough equivalent of an MBA degree. Patterson was also famous for firing many people on relatively trivial grounds, for example, for not riding a horse properly. The story is that he told the man ‘If you can’t manage the horse you can’t manage my men’.