Why did banks settle on that very 70s futuristic—and downright awful-looking—font as the standard typeface for the routing and account numbers on checks? Is there something inherently superior about it? If so, why isn’t it found on more official documents? —B. Yankee, via e-mail

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 What you’re asking about is the font used for magnetic-ink character recognition, better known as the MICR (pronounced “MY-ker”) font. It’s designed to be easily read by machines when printed in magnetizable ink, making it possible to minimize check sorting by humans, which is slow and inaccurate. The need for a machine-readable font became urgent with the explosion in check use following World War II. By 1952, clerks were sorting more than 29 million checks per day by hand—work so stultifying that staff turnover at some bank processing centers was 100 percent or more annually. Processing delays also meant longer check float (the interval between initial deposit and when funds become available), an expensive inconvenience for business.



 The next big decision was font design. The original SRI typeface looked like standard typewriter output. Although this worked OK, MICR-encoded checks would have to be read by machines from several manufacturers using different engineering approaches. A committee on typeface design considered something like 11 different styles to find one that would work equally well in all machines. The winner was E-13B, the font’s designation to this day—meaning drawing E, version B, with a basic line width of 13 thousandths of an inch. As you might guess, E-13B’s pronounced variations in stroke thickness produce a distinctive signal for each character as the check moves past a magnetic sensor called a read head. As originally created and still employed by the banking industry, E-13B comprises only 14 characters: the digits 0 through 9 plus four syntax symbols composed of dots and bars. The matching alphabet characters devised later are useless in check processing; they just give words that groovy robot look.

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration by Slug Signorino.