This Day In Patent History

Dr. Eldredge was a staff scientist at the Stanford Research Institute.

His invention allowed for the conversion of human language into machine language, vastly improving the efficiency of automatic data-processing machines.

Dick West of United Press International wrote in a humour column that the patent was for “an electric instrument which makes it possible for banks to bounce checks faster than was hitherto possible.

General Electric simply described ARS as an “electronic device for ‘reading’ numbers,” the brain of the company’s document handlers which had been in use in banks across America for several years, using Magnetic Ink Character Recognition techniques (MICR).

In a photo with the promotional material produced for patent 3 million, we see ElDredge leaning in over his reader, which was compared in size to a watermelon. In his hand is the kind of document that the machine was designed to read: a standard bank cheque printed with another invention of General Electric’s, the E-13B font.

These two inventions, the company stressed, combined to make a “tremendous technological stride in helping commerce and industry cut through their vast paperwork barrier.” Rapid processing now went through all the steps of reading, sorting, computing, and printing bank statements in as little as a 32-millionth of a second.