Today, this building is home to Henry Ford Health, but under its more modern facade lies what remains of one of Detroit’s true titans of industry, the Burroughs Adding Machine Co.

Burroughs absolutely dominated the industry in a time before computers and calculators were commonplace, helping to make the Motor City the Adding Machine City, too. Burroughs products would not only be seen in banks and corporations around the world, but even on the plane that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in World War II. The company lives on today as Unisys, though it is no longer based in Detroit.

The legendary inventor behind it all

The company’s story begins with inventor William Seward Burroughs, who was born in Rochester, N.Y., on Jan. 28, 1857. (Incidentally, Burroughs was the namesake and grandfather of famed American author William S. Burroughs, one of the best known writers of the Beatnik era of the 1950s and ’60s. It was the fortunes of Burroughs the inventor that allowed Burroughs the writer to travel the world and write.)

Burroughs the inventor had been working as a bank clerk and, as someone who loved to tinker, set out in search of a solution for the endless number-crunching of his job. Before Burroughs’ practical adding machine, bookkeepers had to do the math by hand, a meticulous, often boring and stressful job that could mean financial disaster if a single “1” wasn’t carried over, or a decimal point was in the wrong place. Burroughs’ machine accurately tallied sums at the press of a button, which “would relieve humanity of that brain-wearing work," the Detroit Free Press noted July 26, 1904.

In 1882, Burroughs moved from Auburn, N.Y., to St. Louis, where he met Joseph E. Boyer, a manufacturer who let him use his shop to fiddle with his idea.

"There was Burroughs with his great idea, greater than any of us could fully appreciate, and with his meager capital of $300,” Boyer recounted in an issue of In Focus, the Burroughs Co.’s internal magazine. That $300 is the equivalent of about $9,600 in 2023 valuation, when adjusted for inflation. “Long before the first model was actually begun, his money was gone. But as his resources dwindled, his courage rose. I used to leave him at his bench in the evening and find him still there in the morning.”

Though Burroughs did not invent the first calculator or tabulation device, he did come up with the first machine that was both practical and accurate, in 1885. Burroughs applied for a patent, which was approved Aug. 21, 1888.

While waiting on the U.S. Patent Office, Burroughs and business partners Thomas Metcalfe, William R. Pye and R.M. Scruggs founded the American Arithmometer Co. in St. Louis on Jan. 20, 1886. Burroughs would serve as the company’s first vice president. From the start, American Arithmometer offered only a single model, which went on sale in 1890 for $475 - a price as hefty as the machine itself, the equivalent of $16,300 in 2023 valuation, when adjusted for inflation.

Now, these machines may not have been cheap, but they were revolutionary, offering the companies behind the country’s growing industrial might a way to quickly and accurately tally up profits, inventory, expenses and payroll. That said, because the technology was new and the price was high, the product didn’t fly off the shelves right away. Indeed, it took about 10 years for the company to take off, with sales reaching 284 machines in 1895, the same year it established the Burroughs Adding and Registering Co. in England. In 1898, the company opened a plant in Nottingham, England, its first outside the U.S., and had increased its product line to four models. By 1900, the company’s sales hit 972 units, and its workforce had grown to 200 employees.

"When the Burroughs machine was first placed on the market, it was looked upon with doubt and suspicion," the Free Press wrote July 26, 1904, “but now, no such conditions confront it, for its thousands and thousands of users have given testimony after testimony as to its accuracy, and the fact that it has no tendency to get out of order, adds pleasure to its use.” At first, it was used primarily by banks - "an absolute necessity" for them, the Free Press noted - but it soon found use in many other industries and businesses.

Again, to be clear, Burroughs was not the world’s first calculator (the abacus, for instance, has been around for thousands of years), but it was the first to go mainstream and would absolutely dominate the market. At its peak, the Burroughs Adding Machine Co. sold about 90 percent of the world’s calculating machines.

However, just as his invention was taking business offices around the world by storm, Burroughs fell ill and retired. He died Sept. 14, 1898, in Citronelle, Ala., at only 41 years of age. He was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1986.

Following Burroughs’ death, Boyer took over as president in 1902 of what was then still called American Arithmometer in the States. Boyer was picked, not only because of his experience in industry, but because he had ties to the company since before its founding. Boyer would not only take the company to new heights, he would take the company - as well as its employees and their families - to Detroit.

Motown-bound

After 12 years in St. Louis, American Arithmometer had outgrown its facilities and needed something larger. The trouble was, the City of St. Louis was playing hardball.

Boyer decided to do something drastic. The businessman had previously moved his pneumatic tool factory from St. Louis to Detroit and was already well-known in Michigan. If St. Louis wouldn't bend over backward to keep American Arithmometer in Missouri, then Boyer would simply relocate the company and all of its employees to a place that would: Detroit. The news broke in July 1904.

It was said to have been largely through Boyer's influence, and his alone, that the decision to move the company to the Motor City was made. Thus, the futures of not only the company, but of the 465 workers and their families, were decided. This was a huge get for Detroit in terms of tax base and manufacturing prestige. The City of Detroit worked to find housing for all the newly minted Detroiters and to make their transition to their new home as painless as possible.

As the company and its workers were getting ready to make the move, architect Albert Kahn was hired to design the firm a new headquarters and factory. This 70,000-square-foot facility was erected on a field previously owned by the Ferry Seed Co. that was bounded by what is now Burroughs and Amsterdam streets to the north and south, and Second and Third avenues to the west and east. Not only was the factory modern for its era, but it also had a gym, recreation room and library for its workers, part of a trend at the time to make “the office” as pleasurable as possible for employees.

Amazingly, the company relocated all of its records, some of its manufacturing equipment, 465 employees and their families - including those workers’ household furnishings - to Detroit on two trains in a single day, pulling into the Brush Street Depot on Oct. 8, 1904. It took 41 boxcars to fit all of the factory equipment and the employees' stuff.

Waiting to welcome them to their new home was Mayor William C. Maybury and Board of Commerce Presidnet Joseph L. Hudson (he of department store fame). The City also threw them a celebratory party on the passenger steamer Pleasure. The employees were given pins that read, "New citizen of Detroit" on them. Eat that, St. Louis.

Two days after arriving in Detroit, employees came into their new office to help unpack and get the new factory up and running. Just seven days later, the company shipped its first adding machines out of its new factory. By the end of the month, the new Detroit facility had already pumped out 71 adding machines, and was up to 316 that December.

Shortly after making the move, American Arithmometer lent the Detroit Free Press 12 of its adding machines to demonstrate the product. The newspaper used them to total the results of a primary election, and, "with their aid, the Free Press returns were not only made and added more quickly than ever before, but were absolutely accurate. With this year's primary ballot, considering its size, the heavy vote and the large number of candidates, it would have been an almost endless task to add all the figures and to get them so quickly and accurately in the old-fashioned way," the Free Press wrote Oct. 21, 1904.

A new name and new innovations

On Jan. 16, 1905, articles of association were filed officially renaming American Arithmometer as “the Burroughs Adding Machine Co.,” in honor of the man whose vision started it all. It certainly was easier to remember and pronounce than the old name. The new firm was capitalized for $5 million, the equivalent of about $173 million in 2023, when adjusted for inflation. That same year, 1905, would also see Burroughs’ sales increase to 7,800 units, and in 1907, the 50,000th Burroughs machine rolled off the line.

The company continued to grow in its new home of Detroit, and would soon be selling its products around the world. Burroughs had come a long way since having only one machine on offer, and now was selling lines of adding, bookkeeping, billing and calculating machines. Meanwhile, the company kept innovating, with the company introducing adding machines offering both totals and subtotals in 1910. It followed that up a year later with the first machine that could not only add but subtract, as well - a major bonus for tabulating the ups and downs of ledgers.

To keep up with this demand, the Detroit factory received new wings at an astonishing clip, seeing additions built in 1905, '06, '08, '10, '13 and '16. Fittingly, the largest manufacturer of adding machines would have the largest adding machine factory in the world. The plant covered two city blocks, with some 7.5 acres of floor space. Kahn may have designed some, or all, of these additions. He definitely handled yet another expansion that was added to the plant in 1918 and a new boiler plant addition in 1948.

When Burroughs bought out the struggling Moon-Hopkins Billing Machine Co. of St. Louis in May 1921, the Detroit manufacturer added a unique multiplication feature into its fold. It was said that within 10 years, machines with these Moon-Hopkins features made up about 20 percent of Burroughs’ sales.

The Roaring Twenties also saw the company expand sales and production to Africa, Australia, Europe and South America, and by the mid-1920s Burroughs products were being sold in about 60 countries. In 1928, Burroughs celebrated the sale of its 1 millionth adding machine. By 1935, Burroughs had some 450 models of bookkeeping and calculation machines, typewriters and more.

Like many manufacturing companies during World War II, Burroughs stopped production and switched over to building equipment for the war effort. The Norden bombsight, developed by Burroughs in 1942, allowed for the accurate, high-altitude bombing of targets. It was a Burroughs Norden bombsight that was used to drop the atomic bomb Little Boy on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. The military contracts the company landed led to a new focus on the emerging technology of computers. For instance, Burroughs designed the core memory system for the world’s first electronic general-purpose computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (or ENIAC, for short), in 1953.

The firm also continued to hold multiple government contracts after the war. That said, banking institutions and large corporations continued to be Burroughs’ main clientele. The firm adopted the slogan, “Wherever there’s business, there’s Burroughs,” which they would use for decades. As the company entered the 1950s, it had more than 550 sales branches and service centers across the country and Canada, and more than 200 locations around the world. The company was tallying sales of more than $45 million a year, the equivalent of about $776 million in 2024 valuation.

Around this time, the company adopted the slogan, "Where there's business, there's Burroughs." Given Burroughs' global presence and dominant slice of the market share, it was an appropriate one.

The computer era

To reflect its shift from adding machines to these other emerging fields, the Burroughs Adding Machine Co. was rebranded as simply the Burroughs Corp., in 1953. Three years later, the company made a major step into the world of electronics by acquiring the ElectroData Corp., leading to the creation of the influential B5000 series of computers. It would continue to work on U.S. military contracts for the Air Force and Navy. In 1957, Burroughs came up with a guidance computer for the Atlas ICBM missile, and the company also worked on the NORAD system and the Navy’s POLARIS program. A system developed by Burroughs was used to launch the Mercury and Gemini space flights of the 1960s. All of this was done by Detroit-based Burroughs. The Arsenal of Democracy, as the city was known, went far beyond just assembling tanks and planes.

Flush with government cash and the future of computers seeming to hold untold riches, Burroughs hired the firm Smith & Gardner in 1971 to resheath the central part of the Detroit office complex in precast concrete panels. The general contractor was Barton-Malow. Much of the original, two-story factory and office buildings ringing the block were demolished at this time. Nevertheless, the complex still accounted for 532,000 square feet.

2 Davids team up to take on the IBM Goliath

Looking to challenge the IBM business behemoth, Burroughs made an offer to buy mainframe competitor Sperry Corp. in June 1985 in a hostile takeover bid. The Blue Bell, Pa.-based Sperry finally gave in and agreed to sell to the Detroit-based Burroughs on May 27, 1986.

Sperry "spent many an hour trying to find a way to stay independent," George Elling, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. in New York, told the Free Press for a May 28, 1986, story. "They probably discovered there were no white knights (other bidders) available, and they decided that dismemberment (the selling of its assets to discourage Burroughs from continuing its pursuit) would hurt the company."

In a lot of ways, Burroughs' pursuit made sense. After all, with IBM dominating the market, customers would be reassured that buying a Sperry-Burroughs product wouldn't leave them at risk of being left with "orphaned" computer and software equipment from a defunct company. They both made mainframes. Their target customer base didn't overlap (Sperry catered to military and manufacturers; despite its military contracts, Burroughs' strengths laid in banks and government agencies). This all meant that a merger would be an expansion of sales, not a consolidation of one pot of sales.

The deal was closed in September 1986 at $4.8 billion - the equivalent of $13.5 billion in 2023 dollars, when adjusted for inflation - the largest merger in the computer industry at that point. The result would be the second-largest computer firm in the world, with revenues of about $10.5 billion. Even after the merger, however, the new company was still only about a fifth the size of IBM and its $50.6 billion in annual sales.

Put another way, Burroughs had a 7 percent share of the mainframe computer market, and Sperry had about 5 percent. IBM controlled nearly 70 percent.

At the time of the merger, there were about 3,900 Burroughs workers in Michigan, with 1,400 in its Detroit headquarters and 500 in the Fisher Building just up the road. Immediately, concerns rose in Detroit about the possibility that the company would leave the city that it had called home for more than 80 years. Detroit had suffered more than two decades of residents and businesses moving out, taking their tax base with them and leaving vacant homes and buildings in their wake. A Burroughs spokeswoman told the Detroit Free Press for a May 28, 1986, story on the deal that, in terms of where the merged company's headquarters would be, "We have not given it a thought, let alone a decision."

Some held out hope. Barbara Rolando, a secretary in Burroughs' human resources department, told the Free Press that "everybody feels pretty confident (the headquarters) will stay here."

The front page of the Oct. 2, 1986, edition of the Detroit Free Press bore the headline, "Burroughs denies top office to be moved to Pennsylvania," despite senior executives reportedly shopping for homes in suburban Philadelphia. A Burroughs spokeswoman, Jeanette Lerman, told the paper that just because execs were establishing offices out of state did not signal they were abandoning Detroit: "In no way is there going to be an exodus from Detroit. Under no circumstances do we intend to move world headquarters out of Detroit."

Spoiler warning: They did.

Many analysts pointed out that a major challenge facing the merged company would be whether it could continue the costly development of both the Sperry and Burroughs lines in order to retain customer loyalty. In this era, it wasn’t a guarantee that your software that ran on your Dell would run on your IBM. Case in point, The New York Times noted that the two companies had “decidedly incompatible computer lines.” Selling expensive machines to businesses - especially when in the hundreds or thousands of units - that were suddenly no longer compatible or supported would only fuel IBM’s market share. Regardless, nearly all agreed that the company would have to either discontinue some products or develop a line of successor products compatible with both of the older lines.

Following the merger, the decision was made to do away with any business unit that wasn’t computer-related, and a series of closures and consolidations sought to root out redundant jobs and to cut costs. The new company proposed selling off $1.5 billion in assets - the equivalent of $9.7 billion in 2023 valuation - that were deemed nonessential to its information-processing and defense businesses. For instance, in early November 1986, Burroughs agreed to sell part of its Memorex disk-drive division - a company name still familiar to many 38 years later - for $550 million (more than $1 billion in 2023 dollars) to company executives. Meanwhile, Sperry had received several bids for its aerospace and marine division, The New York Times reported Nov. 11, 1986.

Shortly after the deal closed, plans were announced to reduce the new company’s workforce by about 10,000 employees, and many, many more cuts would follow over the years. At the time of the merger in 1986, Sperry had 67,000 employees worldwide; Burroughs had 57,000. But heavy interest payments tied to the merger would continue to dog the computer maker for years, and the job cuts were far from over.

Where there was Burroughs, there is Unisys

Among the cuts and fire sale of assets, it was also decided to do away with the Burroughs name. A contest was held among employees of the two companies that yielded more than 31,000 submissions.

On Nov. 10, 1986, the winner was announced by the merged company’s CEO and chairman, Michael Blumenthal: Unisys. For his efforts to rebrand an international company, Christian “Lee” Machen of Atlanta was awarded a $5,000 check - which is only about $14,000 in 2023. Machen said the name was derived from the words “united,” “information” and “systems.”

“In an announcement at the company's headquarters in Detroit, Mr. Blumenthal said the name signifies that the companies are solidly one,” The New York Times wrote the day after the announcement.

The name change was not the last announcement to come out of Detroit from the computer maker.

Unisys moves out, Henry Ford Health moves in

In the years following the merger, newspaper articles frequently referred to Unisys as "struggling" and "troubled." What had been the nation’s second-largest computer maker had already fallen to third place just a few years later. Between 1989 and 1990, Unisys posted losses of $1.1 billion - the equivalent of $2.5 billion in 2023, when adjusted for inflation - despite its consolidation and cost-cutting efforts. The company had accrued $3.8 billion in debt, or $8.6 billion in 2023 valuation.

It became clear that maintaining dual headquarters in both Detroit and Blue Bell, Pa. - even if many had long seen through that ruse - was unsustainable. So, it came as little surprise when it was announced on May 31, 1991, that Unisys had sold its former Detroit headquarters and 31 acres of land to Henry Ford Health Systems.

Unisys Chairman James Unruh said the sale would help the company erase $200 million of its red ink.

At the time of the sale, Unisys still employed about 3,000 people in Michigan, including 1,200 at the Detroit headquarters and 1,400 at a manufacturing plant in suburban Plymouth. So, while the health system consolidated its business and corporate offices into the building over a seven-year period, Unisys leased back space there.

Gail L. Warden, then-president and CEO of Henry Ford Health Systems, said the purchase was "an investment in our future" and would provide more room at the Detroit campus for patient care and research.

"Our roots are in the city," he told the Free Press for a story the following morning, "and we have over the years confirmed our urban commitment even as others were moving out."

Though Warden didn't name Unisys, it certainly came across as a jab at the turncoats at its new tenant.

But it soon became clear just how troubled Unisys was. The company had been shedding payroll left and right. At the time of the merger in 1986, the combined company had 124,000 workers, and just three years later, that had been slashed to 93,000. By March 1991, it was down to 72,000. But only a month after the sale of its Detroit offices, Unisys announced on July 23, 1991, that it would cut another 10,000 jobs - 14 percent of its workforce - and close more plants and reduce product lines. Why? Because it had just posted a $1.3 billion quarterly loss. That was on top of the more than $1 billion it lost over the preceding two years.

At the same time, Unisys had been accused of fraud in a Pentagon procurement scandal that cost the company $190 million to settle - the largest Pentagon fraud settlement ever. A number of former Unisys executives had already pleaded guilty as part of the investigation. Then shareholders sued Unisys over the scandal, which cost the company at least another $18 million. The months following the Detroit property sale saw Unisys unload several of its operations, such as Timeplex and its defense systems business. Then it dropped health insurance for its retirees in 1992 to save $100 million a year, but that cost the company $111 million after those who had been promised lifetime medical as part of their buyout packages filed a class-action. By 1996, 10 years after the merger, what had been a global workforce of 124,000 had been reduced to a mere 37,400.

The point is, though it could have chosen to remain in Detroit over Pennsylvania, Unisys had no choice but to unload one of its headquarters. Given Detroit’s challenges in terms of population loss, crime and economic downturn, it makes sense why it chose to sell to Henry Ford Health.

Meanwhile, the former Burroughs world headquarters was renamed One Ford Place. Its new owner renovated an entire five-floor wing of the complex and turned it into 45,000 square feet of new labs for the health system’s clinical and scientific research programs.

Today, the facility continues to be home to the health system’s corporate administrative offices as well as behavioral health services for conditions such as addiction, ADHD, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia. Henry Ford Health’s school-based health program, community health programs and tobacco treatment services are also housed in the building.