Optical Reader Inventor Dies

By Mark Brousseau

David H. Shepard, inventor of the optical reader, has died at the age of 84.

The following obituary, written by Douglas Martin, appears in today's New York Times.

David H. Shepard, who in his attic invented one of the first machines that could read, and then, to facilitate its interpreting of credit-card receipts, came up with the near-rectilinear font still used for the cards’ numbers, died on Nov. 24 in San Diego. He was 84.

The cause was bronchiectasis, a disease of the bronchial tubes, his wife, Joyce, said. Mr. Shepard followed his reading machine, more formally known as an optical-character-recognition device, with one that could listen and talk. It could answer only “yes” or “no,” but each answer led to a deeper level of complexity. A later version could simultaneously handle multiple telephone inquiries.

He formed and led companies to profit from his inventions. His Intelligent Machines Research Corporation developed and sold the first dozen optical-character-recognition systems to companies like AT&T, First National City Bank, Reader’s Digest and most major oil companies. Mr. Shepard sketched out the familiar boxy numbers on credit cards, called the Farrington B numeric font, on a cocktail napkin at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, his wife said. The shapes were meant to be as simple and open as possible because gasoline station pump islands were among the earliest places optical character recognition was used; the shapes were meant to minimize the effects of smearing with grease, oil and other substances.

The font — with a 7 that looks like two sides of a rectangle — has persisted even as the numbers have faded from use: the magnetic strip on the cards’ back now carries the necessary information.

Mr. Shepard was in the Army in World War II, helping to break the Japanese code. He then worked on other codes for the Armed Forces Security Agency, the precursor to the National Security Agency. He reasoned that it must be possible to build a machine to read coded messages.

So he and a mechanically inclined colleague, Harvey Cook Jr., went up to the attic of Mr. Shepard’s home in Arlington, Va. They spent a year and $4,000 and came down with what they called Gismo, a machine that could recognize 23 letters of the alphabet as produced by a standard typewriter. After another year’s work and more investment, they had developed a machine that could recognize all 26 characters.

Mr. Shepard filed for the patent under his own name; started his company, Intelligent Machines; and moved operations to a small store in an Arlington shopping mall. IBM agreed to license the machine, formally named Scandex, for a 5 percent royalty.

IBM held back on manufacturing the machine but paid advance royalties, which Mr. Shepard used to make what is widely believed to be the first character-sensing machine to be sold. It was bought by the Farrington Manufacturing Company, a pioneer in the credit-identification field.

Farrington became Mr. Shepard’s best customer, and he sold his own company to Farrington. The deal made Intelligent Machines a subsidiary of Farrington and made Mr. Shepard Farrington’s largest shareholder.

Mr. Shepard left Farrington in 1961, and the next year started another company, the Cognitronics Corporation. In 1964, his “conversation machine” became the first commercial device to give telephone callers access to computer data by means of their own voices. At Cognitronics, he also developed a more accurate method of optical character recognition using lasers.

Mr. Shepard apologized many times for his major role in forcing people to converse with a machine instead of with a human being.