Watson developed IBM's management style and corporate culture from John Henry Patterson's training at NCR.

[3] He turned the company into a highly effective selling organization, based largely on punched card tabulating machines.

His father farmed and owned a modest lumber business located near Painted Post, a few miles west of Corning.

One year later he joined a traveling salesman, George Cornwell, peddling organs and pianos around the farms for William Bronson's local hardware store.

According to his son Thomas J. Watson Jr.'s autobiography: One day my dad went into a roadside saloon to celebrate a sale and had too much to drink.

According to Tom Jr.: This anecdote never made it into IBM lore, which is too bad, because it would have helped explain Father to the tens of thousands of people who had to follow his rules.

[7] Led by John Patterson, NCR was then one of the leading selling organizations, and Range became almost a father figure for Watson and was a model for his sales and management style.

Patterson, Watson, and 26 other NCR executives and managers were convicted for illegal anti-competitive sales practices and were sentenced to one year of imprisonment.

[17] In particular, critics point to the Order of the German Eagle medal that Watson received at the Berlin ICC meeting in 1937, as evidence that he was being honored for the help that IBM's German subsidiary Dehomag (Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen Gesellschaft mbH) and its punch card machines provided the Nazi regime, particularly in the tabulation of census data (which included the location of Jews).

Another study argues that Watson believed, perhaps naively, that the medal was in recognition of his years of labor on behalf of global commerce and international peace.

This occurred when Germany declared war on the United States in December 1941, and the German shareholders took custody of the Dehomag operation.

[7] However, during World War II, IBM subsidiaries in occupied Europe never stopped delivery of punch cards to Dehomag, and documents uncovered show that senior executives at IBM world headquarters in New York took great pains to maintain legal authority over Dehomag's operations and assets through the personal intervention of IBM managers in neutral Switzerland, directed via personal communications and private letters, which confirms the close ties between the company’s headquarters and its subsidiaries throughout the war.

[17] During this same period, IBM became more deeply involved in the war effort for the U.S., focusing on producing large quantities of data processing equipment for the military and experimenting with analog computers.

His eldest son, Thomas J. Watson Jr., joined the United States Army Air Corps and became a bomber pilot.

He was soon hand-picked to become the assistant and personal pilot for General Follet Bradley, who was in charge of all Lend-Lease equipment supplied to the Soviet Union from the United States.

Watson worked with local leaders to create a college in the Binghamton area, where IBM was founded and had major plants.

Watson was also president of the International Chamber of Commerce in 1937; the medal was awarded while the ICC was meeting in Germany that year.

E. Urner Goodman recounts that the elderly Watson attended an international Scout commissioners' meeting in Switzerland, where the IBM founder asked not to be put on a pedestal.

Before the conference was over, Goodman relates, Watson "... sat by that campfire, in Scout uniform, 'chewing the fat' like the rest of the boys".

In 1955 he and his wife gave it, along with one million dollars, to the Methodist Church for use as a retreat and conference center, to be named Watson Homestead in memory of his parents.

Author Kevin Maney tried to find the origin of the quote, but has been unable to locate any speeches or documents of Watson's that contain this, nor are the words present in any contemporary articles about IBM.

One of the first attributions is in the German magazine Der Spiegel of May 22, 1965, stating that IBM boss Thomas Watson had not been interested in the new machines initially, and when the first commercial calculation behemoths appeared in the early 1950s, filling whole floors with thousands of heat generating vacuum tubes, he estimated the demand by the US economy at a maximum of five.

Another early article source (May 15, 1985) is a column by Neil Morgan, a San Diego Evening Tribune writer who wrote: "Forrest Shumway, chairman of The Signal Cos., doesn't make predictions.

In 1946 Sir Charles Darwin (grandson of the famous naturalist), head of Britain's NPL (National Physical Laboratory), where research into computers was taking place, wrote: it is very possible that ... one machine would suffice to solve all the problems that are demanded of it from the whole country.

[38][39]The story already had been described as a myth in 1973; the Economist quoted a Mr. Maney as "revealing that Watson never made his oft-quoted prediction that there was 'a world market for maybe five computers.

[41] The IBM archives of Frequently Asked Questions[42] notes an inquiry about whether he said in the 1950s that he foresaw a market potential for only five electronic computers.

Watson Jr. later gave a slightly different version of the story in his autobiography, where he said the initial market sampling indicated 11 firm takers and 10 more prospective orders.

[44] In 2007, IBM Mid America Employees Federal Credit Union changed its name to Think Mutual Bank.