The beginning of modern salesmanship Born near Dayton, Ohio, in 1844, John Henry Patterson, the seventh of 11 children, spent his childhood working on the 2,000-acre family farm. Patterson helped out when he was growing up by selling his father’s farm goods—sides of bacon from the old smokehouse, molasses from the cellar, sacks of flour and cornmeal from the grist mill, and the like. The amounts charged for the goods would sometimes go unrecorded, and he would be asked by his father, sometimes in the middle of the night, about whom he had charged and how much they had paid. "There must be a better way of recording transactions," thought Patterson. Although Patterson didn’t know it at the time, the seeds of a global business empire were planted. Another "Eureka!" moment for Patterson came later in life when, as a toll-booth attendant on the Miami and Erie Canal, Patterson came up with a way to verify collections to avoid disputes with the home office. "I gave the captain of each canal boat a receipt for the money he paid for canal tolls," he explained. The receipts, which served as passports to the next station or office, became a Patterson innovation that he would put to good use in later years. After college and a stint in the Union Army during the American Civil War, Patterson and his brother Frank set up a miners’ supply store in Coalton, Ohio. However, the expected profits failed to materialize in spite of strong sales. When he heard of a machine invented by saloonkeeper John Ritty that automatically recorded sales, Patterson bought two of these cash registers sight unseen. In six months, the registers helped reduce debt from $16,000 to $3,000 and the business showed a profit of $5,000. Seeing the potential of every shopkeeper in the country having such a device, Patterson bought out the business for $6,000 in 1884, changing the name from National Manufacturing Company to the National Cash Register Company. Before Patterson sold the world on his business system, most merchants had no idea how much profit they should have made at the end of the year or even how much was missing from their cash box at the end of each day. The cash register gave them for the first time the means of running their businesses professionally and systematically.