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The History of the South Side Sportsmen's Club

Historical figures of Connetquot Park and the South Side Sportsmen's Club.
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Charles Ranlett Flint
Charles Ranlett Flint (January 24, 1850 – February 26, 1934) was an American businessman, best known as the founder of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company which later became IBM.

Early life and family
Flint was born on January 24, 1850 in Thomaston, Maine.[1] His father, Benjamin Chapman, had changed the family name to Flint after being adopted by an uncle on his mother's side. The family moved from Maine to New York where his father ran the family's mercantile firm Chapman & Flint, which had been founded in 1837.[2]

Business career
In 1868, Charles Flint graduated from the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn, and in 1871 entered the shipping business as a partner in Gilchrest, Flint & Co., and later W.R. Grace & Co. after a merger.[2]

From 1876 to 1879, he served as the Chilean consul at New York City. He also served as consul general to the United States for Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

In 1892, he merged several companies to form U. S. Rubber. In 1899 he repeated the same with Adams Chewing Gum, Chiclets, Dentyne, and Beemans to form American Chicle. He was also responsible for the formation of American Woolen in 1899.

He negotiated the Wright Brothers' first sales of airplanes overseas.[3]

In 1900, he formed the Time Recording Company in New Jersey, which produced industrial time clocks.  After several mergers, he moved to Endicott, NY  where the company became known as the International Time Recording Co. Although this company excelled, another Flint formation, the Computing Scale Company of America, which made scales and meat and cheese slicers in Dayton, Ohio, wasn’t doing so well. Before finishing the merger, Flint brought the Tabulating Machine Company into the deal. Herman Hollerith founded and operated the Tabulating Machine Company, which manufactured punch-card tabulating equipment for tabulating census data. Although the company did well when it was first founded in 1896, it found itself in dire straits around 1910.[4]

His biggest achievement came in 1911 when he successfully merged the four companies to form the CTR or Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company.[5] In 1924, the company was re-christened as International Business Machines and went on to dominate the computer industry in the United States for several decades. Flint served on the board of directors of IBM until 1930 when he retired.

For his financial dealings he earned the moniker "Father of Trusts".[6]

Other Information
Charles Flint was an avid sportsman and loved swimming, hunting, fishing, sailing, and aviation. He helped found the Automobile Club of America.
 
  1. "Coal Merger?". Time (New York: Time, Inc.) V (7). February 16, 1925. ISSN 0040-781X. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,719856,00.html.
  2. a b Stinson, John: The Charles Ranlett Flint Papers, 1872–1930, New York Public Library, November 1991.
  3. "Obituary". Time (New York: Time, Inc.) XXIII (9). February 26, 1934. ISSN 0040-781X. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,747065,00.html.
  4. Smart Computing® Encyclopedia (http://www.smartcomputing.com/editorial/dictionary/detail.asp?guid=&searchtype=&DicID=16698&RefType=Encyclopedia)
  5. "IBM Archives: Frequently Asked Questions" (PDF). http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/documents/pdf/faq.pdf. Some accounts of the merger forming CTR state that three corporations were merged. This reference notes that only three of the four merged corporations are represented in the CTR name. That may be the reason for the differing accounts.
  6. Cashman, Sean Dennis (1984), America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, New York: New York University Press, p. 57, ISBN 9780814713877, OCLC 9762495