Forrest Corey Parry was born in Cedar City, Utah. He attended the Branch Agricultural College, now Southern Utah University, in Cedar City, before entering the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1942. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1945.
In the Korean War, Parry served on the USS Walke as Frist Lieutenant and Damage Control Officer. 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.
In 1952, Parry was discharged, and went to work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He also married Dorothea Tillia, with whom he would go on to have five children. He left Livermore in 1954 to work for Dow Chemical, and then Unette Corporation.
In 1957, Parry began a 30-year career at IBM, mostly in Rochester, Minnesota. While at IBM, Parry developed devices and systems for high-speed printers, optical character readers, Universal Product Code (UPC) checkout systems, and an Advanced Optical Character Reader (“AOCR”), which reads addresses from mailed letters and reprints them as bar codes for easy resorting at smaller post offices equipped with simpler and cheaper sorting machines.
In 1960, Parry conceived the magnetic stripe card for use by the U.S. Government. The magnetic stripe contained data on three tracks, each track only 2.8 millimeters wide. By providing minimum cardholder account information needed to be transmitted from one or more of the tracks to a point-of-sale card reader, a transaction could be completed without including the cardholder’s secure information on the card itself. The reader would contact a remote database to complete verification and transmit transaction details.
However, Parry’s attempts to prepare a working prototype by gluing short pieces of magnetic tape to a plastic card were unsuccessful, because the glue warped the tape, and made the tape unusable. Parry spent days in his garage, fiddling with reels of tape, failing over and over, and growing increasingly frustrated. Dorothea came in with cookies and coffee, and proposed using a laundry flat iron to melt the stripe onto the card. Parry tried using the iron, and it worked – the heat of the iron was just high enough to bond the tape to the card.
From there, a new era of finance would emerge. After Parry worked out the kinks in the performance issues and optimized the encoding process, the financial industry took notice of his invention. Major banks and financial institutions launched pilot programs, with a handful of banks adopting the magnetic stripe technology for a small percentage of cards.
Transaction times decreased, customer satisfaction increased, and fraud rates plummeted. By the mid-1970s, magnetic stripe credit cards were the industry standard, issued by virtually every major bank and credit institution in the United States. Soon banks around the world adopted the technology. Magnetic stripe technology has since been used in gift cards, hotel keycards, and security identification badges.
Without Forrest and Dorothea, we could still be leaving physical imprints of our credit card numbers behind at merchants and restaurants today.