Following his doctorate in physics from Cambridge, Dr. Eldredge was recruited to join SRI by Tom Morrin, the first Director of Engineering, to head up a new Instrumentation and Control Group. When he joined SRI in 1953, he was an immediate influence on our early direction in two major ways. First, Ken’s unusually broad background in industrial instrumentation was the catalyst for an explosive buildup of projects and staff that became the base for programs that still exist today at SRI. All the programs that have spun off from his lab, including Bioengineering, Graphic Sciences, Mechanical Engineering, and the Control Systems Lab, made a strong contribution to SRI's technical reputation and financial well being.
Second, Ken’s personal technical creativity and ingenuity led to the concept of Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR), as opposed to a bar code, for tagging and automatically sorting bank checks—a system still used today by the banking industry. The novelty of the idea led the US Patent Office to honor him with US Patent Number 3,000,000.
His group was soon working in sensors, lubrication, friction, and automatic inspection, but it was the fortuitous timing of an assignment to develop a machine for automatically sorting encoded bank checks (associated with the Bank of America ERMA project) that permitted explosive staff growth and the opportunity to show what could be done in the fields of high speed mechanical handling, character recognition, control circuitry, and ink chemistry
By 1956, the original staff of two had become the Control Systems Laboratory, with Electronics, Mechanical Development, and Basic Sciences Groups. The Basic Sciences Group became the Applied Physics Lab under Charlie Rosen, which eventually led to the Artificial Intelligence Center. The other component grew to become the Electron Devices Lab under Ivor Brodie. Ken Eldredge's significant contributions to SRI are still apparent today.