Forrest Corry Parry (July 4, 1921 – December 31, 2005) was the IBM engineer who invented the

magnetic stripe card The term digital card can refer to a physical item, such as a memory card on a camera, or, increasingly since 2017, to the digital content hosted as a virtual card or cloud card, as a digital virtual representation of a physical card. They share ...

used for credit cards and identification badges. Parry was born in Cedar City, Utah to Edward H. Parry and Marguerite C. Parry. Forrest attended the Branch Agricultural College (BAC) now Southern Utah University, in Cedar City before entering the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md, in 1942. He graduated from the Naval Academy in June 1945. When the

Korean War , date = {{Ubl, 25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953 (''de facto'')({{Age in years, months, weeks and days, month1=6, day1=25, year1=1950, month2=7, day2=27, year2=1953), 25 June 1950 – present (''de jure'')({{Age in years, months, weeks a ...

began in 1950, Parry served on the USS Walke as First Lieutenant and Damage Control Officer. After the Walke was hit by a torpedo or floating mine which killed 26 sailors and wounded 40, Parry was awarded a Bronze Star with Valor.

Career

After leaving the Navy in 1952, Parry went to work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and married Dorothea Tillia. They raised five children. Parry left Livermore in 1954 to work for Dow Chemical and then at Unette Corporation, a small plastic packaging firm. In May 1957, Parry began his 30-year career with IBM, mostly in Rochester, Minnesota. While at IBM, he developed devices and systems for high-speed printers, optical character readers,

Universal Product Code The Universal Product Code (UPC or UPC code) is a barcode symbology that is widely used worldwide for tracking trade items in stores. UPC (technically refers to UPC-A) consists of 12 digits that are uniquely assigned to each trade item. Along wi ...

(UPC) checkout systems, and an Advanced Optical Character Reader (AOCR) which reads addresses from mailed letters and reprints it as bar codes for easy resorting at smaller post offices that have simpler and cheaper sorting machines. In 1960, while at IBM, Parry invented the

for use by the U.S. Government. He had the idea of gluing short pieces of magnetic tape to each plastic card, but the glue warped the tape, making it unusable. When he returned home, Parry's wife Dorothea was using a flat iron to iron clothes. When he explained his inability to get the tape to "stick" to the plastic in a way that would work, she suggested that he use the iron to melt the stripe onto the card. He tried it and it worked. The heat of the iron was just high enough to bond the tape to the card. Magnetic stripes are now used on credit cards, debit cards, gift cards,

stored-value card A stored-value card (SVC) is a payment card with a monetary value stored on the card itself, not in an external account maintained by a financial institution. This means no network access is required by the payment collection terminals as funds ...

s, hotel keycards, and security identification badges.

Publications of Forrest Parry

* F. C. Parry, ''IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin'', "Identification Card", Vol. 3, No. 6, November 6, 1960, page 8

References

Merchant Glossary

Forrest Corry Parry Obituary in Cedar City Review, Vol. 1, No. 33, February 2, 2006
{{DEFAULTSORT:Parry, Forrest 1921 births 2005 deaths 20th-century American inventors United States Navy personnel of the Korean War Dow Chemical Company employees IBM employees People from Cedar City, Utah Southern Utah University alumni United States Naval Academy alumni

Career

Publications of Forrest Parry

See also

References