Whether you love the convenience of credit cards or hate the way they make spending money so easy, everyone who's ever pulled out the plastic to make a purchase owes a debt to For-rest Parry.
Parry is the man who invented the black strip of magnetic tape used on the back of each and every credit card."It was years before I realized the thing was so significant," said Parry, who was born in Cedar City and is now retired in St. George.
Parry began his career with the Special Engineering Products Division of IBM in 1957, after serving as a gunnery officer in the Navy.
The concept of the magnetic strip began as the CIA was seeking a new security system to safeguard a headquarters building, Parry said. He and his team tried systems to verify employees by their handprints or fingerprints, but ran into obstacles.
"The technology was possible, but the costs were prohibitive," Parry said.
Finally, after about five months on the project, Parry used his knowledge of a printing process called hot stamping and some magnetic computer tape to solve the problem. With his wife's iron, he transferred the computer tape to a small plastic card.
"These things just came together," he said.
The final result was a round plastic disk with a picture embedded inside and a short strip of black magnetic tape on the right side.
But the CIA thought the process was too expensive and not foolproof enough to warrant development, and the project was shelved, Parry said.
It wasn't until several years later, when a banking company wanted to use the magnetic strip on prototype automatic teller machines that Parry learned the government had patented the idea in his name.
Soon afterward, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system of San Francisco also wanted to use the magnetic tape on its fare cards, he said.
Since then, the strip has begun to appear on cards of all varieties, including drivers' licenses, pre-paid phone cards and cards that allow users to make photocopies.
Those who worry that one day every detail of a person's life will be encoded on plastic card are probably right but shouldn't be alarmed, Parry said.
"That's nothing to worry about," he said.
With all the numbers involved in an individual's life - checking accounts, addresses, telephone numbers, social security numbers - it's only a matter of time until they're all put on a card, he said.
"There's no way of stopping it. It's the inevitable march of economics. Some day, if it's not being done right now, all those numbers will be consolidated."
During the remainder of his career with IBM, Parry helped pioneer the personal computer and the bar code scanners used in supermarkets.
But the project he is most proud of is his work on the Advanced Optical Character Reader, a device used by the Postal Service to sort mail. Rather than scanning a bar code, the device actually deciphers the addresses from letters, he said.
"It was a superb technological accomplishment," Parry said.