"In 1918, 1 think it was that I made my first invention. I built a machine to throw rocks."
Jacob Rabinow
Jacob Rabinow (1910-1999) left Russia with his family during the Russian Revolution, arriving eventually in New York. After studying electrical engineering, he worked for the American National Bureau of Standards, where he began churning out inventions, which led to a staggering 230 U.S. patents. His first inventions were military and involved missile guidance systems, but he is probably best known for his "Reading Machine."
Optical character recognition (OCR) had been around for some time. A commercial system was installed at the offices of Reader's Digest in 1955, but the results were often unpredictable. In 1960 Rabinow incorporated a new principle into the idea that would greatly reduce the errors made- by other reading systems. His machine was the first to include a "Best Match Principle," which compared the information it scanned with a set of standards in a matrix, consisting of letters, numbers, and other symbols.
This new method of scanning documents soon became popular and is still the basis of all modern OCR systems. The optical recognition of Latin-based languages is now 99 percent accurate; however, the race is still on to perfect a method for electronically reading handwriting. OCR has been used to sort mail; a less popular application has been in car number plate recognition by speed cameras.
