Sperry Corporation

~ the obit ~

The first computer in Turkey was an IBM 650, installed at the General Directorate of Highways in 1960 to calculate road alignments. Its first job was the sixty three kilometer stretch between Polatlı and Sivrihisar, and it did in about an hour the arithmetic a room of engineers would have spent weeks on. The machine stayed in service for roughly twelve years and is on display at the directorate's training facility in Eskişehir. Every country that got computing in that decade got it from IBM, and this page is about the largest of the companies that spent the same decade failing to be IBM.

Sperry was incorporated on 14 April 1910 by Elmer Ambrose Sperry as the Sperry Gyroscope Company, at an address in downtown Brooklyn, to build the marine gyrostabilizer and the gyrocompass he had invented. A gyroscope turns out to be the basis of everything an aircraft needs in order to know where it is, so the company spent the next forty years making artificial horizons, automatic pilots, bombsights and gyro gunsights. It ranked nineteenth among American corporations by the value of its wartime production contracts, and it built the ball turret that hung under the B-17 and the B-24.

In 1955 Sperry bought Remington Rand and renamed itself Sperry Rand. That purchase came with the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and Engineering Research Associates, which is to say it came with the men who had built ENIAC and with the UNIVAC line, plus a cross-licensing deal with IBM that was worth a great deal to both sides. For the next twenty years Sperry Rand was a conglomerate in the full sense: mainframes for governments, electric razors for households, combine harvesters for farms, typewriters, hydraulics and air traffic control equipment, all under versions of one family name. It ranked 34th on the Fortune 500 in 1961. In 1978 it sold off the office equipment and the hydraulics, dropped Rand from the title, and decided it was a computer company.

Burroughs came at it with a hostile bid in 1986 and Sperry defended with a poison pill, a major hike in its own share price meant to make the company too expensive to swallow. The effect was to make the takeover dearer rather than impossible. Burroughs borrowed the difference and finished it. The Sperry board approved $4.8 billion on 27 May 1986 and the deal closed on 16 September, and the combined company took a portmanteau name, Unisys, built from the words united and information systems with a deliberate echo of UNIVAC.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the seven dwarfs ~

The phrase for the mainframe market of the 1960s was IBM and the Seven Dwarfs. IBM was Snow White and the seven were Burroughs, Sperry Rand, NCR, Control Data, Honeywell, General Electric and RCA. Sperry was the biggest of them, and being the biggest of them meant holding a few percent of a market against a company that held most of it. General Electric and RCA quit the business at the turn of the 1970s, and Sperry took over the RCA Spectra 70 line and its customers when they went.

The two moments that put UNIVAC into ordinary speech both came early. The Census Bureau accepted the first machine on 31 March 1951. On election night in November 1952 CBS used a UNIVAC to project the presidential result from a sample of 5.5 percent of the turnout, and it returned an Eisenhower landslide at odds of a hundred to one. The network decided the machine was wrong, had the statistician rework it into something more modest, and broadcast that instead. The final count was 442 electoral votes to 89, under one percent off the original projection, and Charles Collingwood had to go on air later the same night and admit they had held it back.

~ the poison pill that made it worse ~

Burroughs was the smaller of the two companies by revenue, which is the detail that makes the defense backfire interesting. Pushing the share price up did not stop a determined buyer, it only forced that buyer to borrow more, and the borrowing did not disappear at closing. Unisys therefore began life in September 1986 as the second largest computer company in the world, behind IBM, carrying the debt from the fight that had created it. It spent the next decade selling divisions to pay that down, and by the middle of the 1990s it was a services business that happened to own some mainframes.

~ what got sold off ~

A conglomerate comes apart in pieces and the pieces go to different buyers. New Holland, the farm and construction equipment arm, went to Ford Motor Company in 1986 and on to Fiat in 1991. Sperry Marine went to Tenneco in 1987 and sits inside Northrop Grumman today. Sperry Aerospace Group went to Honeywell and the Defense Products Group went to Loral, which ended up part of Lockheed Martin, so the two units that had been the heart of the original gyroscope division were separated and sold in the same year.

The British side has its own line. Sperry started in Britain in 1913 with a factory in Pimlico making gyrocompasses for the Royal Navy, expanded to Brentford in 1931 and Bracknell in 1957, and employed around three and a half thousand people across those sites by 1963. Bracknell went to British Aerospace in 1982. A four and a half meter aluminum sculpture of a gyroscope by Philip Bentham, made in 1967, still commemorates the site of the factory.

The name is in use in two unrelated places today, which is the usual trap with a company this old. Sperry Marine, formed in 1997 out of three marine brands and headquartered in New Malden, sells navigation and automation systems as a Northrop Grumman business, and that one is a genuine descendant. Sperry the shoe brand is not. It was started by Paul Sperry in 1935, has no connection to Elmer Sperry's company, and is the reason sperry.com resolves to a boat shoe.

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