Early Monroe
The account of early Monroe is reflected and excerpted below in the document entitled The Pursuit of an Ideal, Copyright 1934, Monroe Calculating Machine Company This publication provided a brief account of Jay R. Monroe and the founding of the Monroe Company.
“The pursuit of a definite ideal in a human way has resulted in the Monroe Spirit”.
Seated on the porch of his boarding house in East Orange, New Jersey, smoking his evening pipe, a young man of twenty-eight was discussing with a companion the possibilities of reducing the endless routine of office figure work.
My idea would be, the young man said in effect, to manufacture a machine to turn out routine figures; one that would add and subtract, multiply and divide with equal ease and would produce the answers almost as fast as they can be written down; that would be simple and practically foolproof to operate, with all factors used visible on the machine so the operator would know the answers were correct. Such a machine would greatly increase the efficiency of the office worker and would be a tremendous boon to the executive.
Overhearing the conversation and recognizing the young man’s earnestness, a fellow-boarder remarked that he had seen a machine which might answer these requirements and would be glad to arrange a meeting with the inventor, who had a room at the Brooklyn Navy Yard with his son. The appointment was made and the two men met – Jay R. Monroe, President and Founder of the Monroe Calculating Machine Company, and Frank Stephen Baldwin, inventor of the Baldwin Calculator, the basic principles of which formed the basis of the first Monroe Adding-Calculator. When Mr. Monroe saw the machine, which Mr. Baldwin had been told was ahead of its time, he immediately recognized its possibilities. Although he felt that it lacked the flexibility which would permit its ready adaptability to the work of the business office, and it should have a keyboard for simplicity of operation, as well as other refinements which would make it acceptable as an instrument of efficiency and economy, it was fundamentally the device Mr. Monroe was looking for.
The two men signed a contract under which Mr. Monroe secured an option to buy or pay a royalty on existing and future patents of Mr. Baldwin. Mr. Baldwin, after a few days’ deliberation, had named his own figure and without any comment Mr. Monroe had inserted that amount in the contract. It was Mr. Monroe’s conviction that no one but the owner of the patents could place a money value upon them. Up to that time no one had been willing to undertake the development of the machine and it was a gamble whether a marketable calculator could be built. He was, however, willing to pay whatever Mr. Baldwin considered the patents were worth.
Mr. Monroe then rented a small shop at the corner of Spring and Greenwich Streets in New York City, and engaging Mr. Baldwin as his assistant, set to work. Besides a natural ability along engineering lines, Mr. Monroe had also the advantage of actual experience on office figure work. He had been graduated from the Law School of the University of Michigan in 1906 and had then been connected with the Western Electric Company in Chicago, where his work involved a study of accounting methods. Later he had gone to the Pittsburgh offices of that company. In 1910 he had transferred to their New York offices and was employed there when he met Mr. Baldwin in 1911.
On borrowed funds, the experimental work went forward until finally a machine was evolved which met Mr. Monroe’s rigid requirements. In April of 1912, with a capital consisting of his machine model, his contract with Mr. Baldwin, and some patent applications of his own, Mr. Monroe organized the Monroe Calculating Machine Company. He retained one half the stock and sold the other half for cash with which to start manufacturing the first Monroe Adding-Calculators.
The new machine had its first public showing at the National Business Show in New York City in the fall of 1912. Mr. Monroe rented a small space, set up his own exhibit and displayed his single model Monroe Adding-Calculator. He was his own salesman, serviceman, and publicity agent, but his enthusiasm for his product and the machine’s remarkable performance made the Monroe a sensation of the show. Business executives viewed it as one of the mechanical marvels of the day. One of the visitors, a manufacturer of Bloomfield, New Jersey, decided it was just the machine he needed to figure his inventory, despite Mr. Monroe’s protests that he was not entirely satisfied with some of the mechanical details of the machine and that it was not yet on the market, finally persuaded him to accept the first order for a Monroe. The machine with which that order was filled was one of ten which made up the first year’s production, all of them built almost entirely by hand.
The original Monroe factory was a rented shop in Newark, but in the spring of 1913 purchase was made of the four-story building which housed the general offices. When the entire Monroe outfit was moved in, it occupied only part of the first and second floors. The personnel consisted of only nine men and the complete machine equipment included a lathe and two small presses. It was necessary to have some of the operations performed outside the plant and Mr. Monroe would take such parts in his own car to the factory which did the work, calling for them himself when the work was completed.
Though the business soon outgrew the bounds of a “one man organization,” Mr. Monroe has never failed to keep in close personal touch with all its branches. He has constantly studied the needs of the business world and anticipated its demands in figuring equipment. He realized that the building of a calculating machine and its acceptance as an instrument of economy was a pioneering task and he selected carefully the men who were to help him carry out his program.
His own unbounded confidence and honesty of purpose has always been reflected among his associates. From the very beginning his aim has been “The pursuit of a definite ideal in a human way,” and in a talk to the sales organization at one of the first conferences in 1917, he gave as his three aims for the Monroe Company: “I would like to have this Company noted the world over for its ‘pull-together’ spirit. I would like to have it noted for its liberality and fairness to customers. And of course, our ideal is to build the best calculating machine.”
The sales organization which carries the Monroe story throughout the world had its official beginning in 1915. Then territories were vast and production could not keep pace with the demand for machines but Monroe representatives then as now offered a remarkable figuring device backed by an intelligent figuring service.
In those early years, when the cumbersome, square cornered D, E, F, and G machines were rapidly succeeding each other, the entire Monroe line consisted of only one model. When the K machine, the first model of radically different design, was introduced in 1921, however, it was manufactured in three different sizes. The first electrically operated Monroe’s, the KA models, were introduced in the fall of 1922, and marked another step in the realization of Mr. Monroe’s dream of a fast, efficient, calculating machine. Anticipating the demand for a small, quiet, portable adding-calculator, the L series was introduced in 1928 with the hand-operated Executive, followed by the electrically operated models of this series. The Noiseless Monroe introduced in the MA series in 1931, another milestone of Monroe progress.
For twenty-three years Mr. Monroe actively devoted himself to his purpose – the desire to offer to the business world a calculating machine which will produce answers as effortlessly as the turning of an electric switch produces light. And always he has held fast to the ideal which has been his since the Company’s inception, a personal interest in the members of his own organization. When in 1929 he was approached with offers of millions of dollars for the Monroe Company, his reply was: “I have a feeling of real friendship for the men who have helped to build our business over a long period of years. I have no desire to sell men out who have worked shoulder to shoulder with me in building the business which we are all proud to call ours.”
Guided by this spirit and with the loyal support of the members of all departments of the organization, Mr. Monroe has won for the Monroe Company the position of leadership in the office equipment industry which it has enjoyed for so many years. |
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