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MICR [Thomas D. Hayosh]

MICR stands for Magnetic Ink Character Recognition. This PDF file by Thomas D. Hayosh (1995) retraces the history of the cheque. The American Bankers Association had a Technical Committee, about which we read: In July 1956, the Technical Committee published Document 138, Magnetic Ink Character Recognition: The Common Machine Language for Check Handling where the committee recommended magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) based on the advantages of having a machine readable language which is also easily readable by humans; on the relative insensitivity of the magnetic ink signals to mutilation by most overstamping, endorsing and writing instruments; and on a demonstration of the feasibility of this approach. Following this, all the major machine manufacturers involved, representatives of the printing industry, and the Federal Reserve System unanimously indicated their concurrence of MICR as the common machine language for mechanized check handling. Of note, during the first OEM Committee meeting, in September 1956, Dr. Kenneth R. Eldredge of the Stanford Research Institute presented his work on magnetic character recognition on behalf of the General Electric Co. Dr. Eldredge filed for a patent on Automatic Reading System on May 6, 1955 and was granted U.S. Patent 3,000,000 on September 12, 1961. The U.S. Patent Office was reported to have held the number 3,000,000 to be assigned to a significant invention. Indeed, MICR as applied to banking automation, in retrospect, was truly significant. Stanford Research Institute, Bank of America, and GE because of their early state of the art work in magnetic ink recognition were heavily involved in submitting and evaluating many of the fonts which were submitted to the Type Design Committee.

It continues about the E-13A font: Publication 146, released in July 1958, entitled A Progress Report: Mechanization of Check Handling, specified the clear printing areas on the check and announced the field evaluation test for the E-13A type font. Some 50 printers were involved in a trial printing of the font. The Type Design Committee engaged Batelle Memorial Institute to administer the details of the trial printing and machine readability of the font. The Institute acted as a clearing house for instructions and to receive unidentified printing batches and forward them to the 5 machine companies for evaluation. The readability results were compiled by Battelle and presented in a report. Finally, in November 1958, the Type Design Committee agreed on a change in the Transit symbol and a relaxation of the void specification.

Finally, E-13B was born: Many often wonder what does the designation E-13B stand for? E is the 5th letter of the alphabet which signifies 5 numerical type fonts or styles of type that were studied starting with the letter A. The 13 means the 0.013 inch grid that constitutes the matrix of the font. Each character has segments which are multiples of the 0.013 inch grid. The B stands for a modification of the 5th type font. In this case, with the E-13A font, a problem was noted as the transit symbol was sometimes misread as a character 8. Subsequently, the transit symbol was changed to what we have today and the type font was then designated as E-13B.

And CMC-7 saw the light in 1965: The Standards Committee on Computers and Information Processing, X3, with the Business Equipment Manufacturers Association as Secretariat, recognized the desirability of issuing the E-13B work as an American National Standard. It formed the X3-7 Subcommittee on MICR and with the assistance of the X3-7-1 technical group issued 2 related standards on MICR in 1963 as ANSI X3.2-1963, American National Standard: Print Specifications for Magnetic Character Ink Character Recognition and ANSI X3.3-1963, American National Standard: Bank Check Specifications for Magnetic Ink Character Recognition. Much of the information presented in those first Standards were taken from Publication 147. Meanwhile, the X3 committee kept X3-7 active and endorsed X3-7's participation in the International Organization for Standardization, Technical Committee 97, Subcommittee 3 (ISO/TC 97/SC3) on Character Recognition. After a series of international meetings which terminated in 1965, the ISO Recommendation R 1004-1969, Print Specification for Magnetic Character Recognition, was published. This recommendation contained the E-13B specifications in addition to another MICR character set known internationally as CMC-7.

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