The Voracious Eye

RESEARCH & DISCOVERY

The newest wonder of the electronic age is a machine that can read and digest and retain what it reads--even if it takes no special pleasure in curling up with a good book. Known in industry as the optical scanner, it operates roughly on the principle of the human eye, has already earned the obvious Orwellian nickname:

"The Eye." With the help of light beams, video and mirrors, the optical scanner moves rapidly across letters, numbers and handwriting, breaks them down into "machine language," or electrical impulses, and passes them along for an analysis to an electronic computer (see diagram). The scanner can do the work of from 25 to 100 people better and faster than they could, rarely makes errors, and does not need time out for coffee breaks.

In the burgeoning field of data processing, involving everything from billing customers to registering book club memberships, the optical scanner is a major, long-awaited breakthrough. The chief limitation of computers--aside from their inability to think except as told--is that they can record and process information only as fast as they are fed it, usually by bored and fallible humans who read the information, then punch it onto cards or tape for the computer. With the optical scanner, which can read up to 96,000 cards per day, the computer--and every paper-laden company--has found a powerful ally. Scanners already read and process insurance premium notices, gas station bills, travelers checks, dividend checks. The National Biscuit Co. has cut the time for tallying inventory from a month to three days with a scanner, and a scanner-sorter being tested for the Post Office Department can process letters five times faster than by hand.

Kindergarten & Bookworms. All these machines are the products of a little-known firm called Farrington Manufacturing Co. of Needham Heights, Mass., an old-line display-box and credit-card maker that has taken a giant step into electronics. Tiny Farrington (1959 gross revenues: $10.9 million) has stolen a march on the nation's giant business machine makers. It is the only U.S. company with scanners in commercial operation, already has 31 reading voraciously for U.S. industry. This week Farrington announced that five insurance companies have ordered optical scanners to solve their premium-billing paperwork problems. Farrington's scanners range from a simple, kindergarten type, which reads only numbers, to a sophisticated bookworm that can read whole pages at a time. They rent out on a three-year lease at $1,650 to $6,100 per month.

So vast and alluring is the potential of the optical scanner that Farrington's competitors are doubling their efforts to bring out their own scanners. IBM is testing several models, and RCA will soon field-test a pilot model to handle subscriptions at a major publishing house. Addressograph-Multigraph Corp. has its first orders for optical readers from major oil Companies. National Data Processing

Corp. (51% owned by Chance Vought Aircraft) is developing a scanner: so is Cambridge's Baird-Atomic, Inc., which is working on a scanner for the Air Force that is able to read Russian, then feed it to a computer that translates the words into English. Though all employ similar principles, each machine differs considerably in detail, and the makers guard their secrets carefully.

Built in the Attic. Farrington got its head start because, as the nation's biggest supplier (80% of the market) of the Charga-Plates used in retail stores, it wanted a method to process its cards automatically. In 1955 it came upon a tiny Virginia company called Intelligent Machines Research Corp., whose president, David H. Shepard, had built his first optical scanner in an attic in 1950. Farrington bought its first scanner from Intelligent Machines in 1955, liked the machine so well that it persuaded Shepard to join the company. Shepard received 10% of Farrington's stock (now worth about $7,000,000), became Farrington's vice president for research and development.

Big Enough for Ten. The scanners' biggest future, says Farrington's President William M. Tetrick, 42, lies in the field of retailing, where they can read cash register slips and charge plates, perform inventory chores. They have potential applications in printing to feed information to typesetting machines. But they are apt to have a tough time breaking into one profitable field--banking--since many banks have already invested in expensive machines that use magnetic rather than optical scanning. Farrington expects that next year its scanners will be used by public utilities for semi-automated billing, complete with a Farrington-made home meter reader that punches the reading onto a strip of paper for the scanner. Says Tetrick: "The market for optical scanning is so big that there is room for ten companies.'' Farrington has already discovered that many companies prefer to hide the fact that they are buying a scanner: employees get nervous at the thought of a voracious seeing-eye settle down in their midst.

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