Forrest Corry Parry (July 4, 1921 – December 31, 2005) was an AmericanIBM engineer who invented themagnetic stripe card used forcredit cards and identification badges.[1][2]
Parry was born in Cedar City, Utah to Edward H. Parry and Marguerite C. Parry. Forrest attended the Branch Agricultural College (BAC) nowSouthern Utah University, in Cedar City before entering theU.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md, in 1942. He graduated from the Naval Academy in June 1945.[citation needed]
When theKorean War began in 1950, Parry served on theUSS 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.[citation needed]
After leaving the Navy in 1952, Parry went to work atLawrence Livermore National Laboratory and married Dorothea Tillia. They raised five children. Parry left Livermore in 1954 to work forDow Chemical and then atUnette Corporation, a small plastic packaging firm.
In May 1957, Parry began his 30-year career with IBM, mostly inRochester, Minnesota. While at IBM, he 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 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 themagnetic stripe card for use by the U.S. Government.[3] He had the idea of gluing short pieces of magnetic tape to eachplastic 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.[4][5] The heat of the iron was just high enough to bond the tape to the card. Magnetic stripes are used on credit cards, debit cards, gift cards,stored-value cards, hotel keycards, and security identification badges, though they are being phased out in favor of other means of digital identification, such asQR codes andNFC chips and apps.[6]