By Bart Ward
In 1915, World War I was in full swing,
Einstein published his General Theory of
Relativity, Tesla and Edison were ignored
by the Nobel Prize committee, Gandhi
returned to India from South Africa,
Alexander Graham Bell made the first
transcontinental call and Frank Sinatra
was born. That same year, William Roy
(W.R.) Hotchkiss founded what would
become Deluxe Check Printing, in St.
Paul, Minnesota.
Checking printing at the time was
regional and mostly used by the business
community. Some 90% of businesses used
checks for payment transactions, with the
public using bank counter checks for their
personal use. In fact, bank counter checks
were often distributed by various banks
to stores that then made them available to
customers who filled in their names and
addresses on the checks where they banked.
When Hotchkiss started his business,
America was booming from World War I,
and the Federal Reserve Bank of the Ninth
District was located in Minneapolis. The
Federal Reserve System had been created
in 1913 through the Federal Reserve Act,
and check clearing was part of the Fed’s
job as mandated by Cong