Short answers, pulled from the story.
The earliest known surviving cheque was issued on the 16th of February 1659 by a London scrivener named Morris and Clayton. This document is now preserved in the British Museum and marks the dawn of a financial revolution. Before this date, merchants relied on carrying heavy bags of gold or silver to conduct business.
The roots of the modern cheque stretch back to the 9th century where Persian bankers issued letters of credit known as čak. These instruments evolved into the sakk used by traders in the Abbasid Caliphate to create the first international banking system. By the 13th century the concept had spread to Venice where bills of exchange were developed to facilitate international trade.
The standard for machine-readable characters known as MICR was agreed upon and patented in the United States on the 1st of May 1959. This innovation allowed banks to use automated sorting machines to process cheques and drastically reduce the time required to clear payments. The technology enabled the creation of automated central clearing facilities and paved the way for cheque truncation.
The use of cheques reached its peak by the early 1990s with billions of documents issued annually across the globe. In the United States the average American wrote 60 checks annually in the year 2000 before the figure plummeted to just over one check per month by October 2023. Countries like New Zealand completely phased out cheques by 2020 while Australia announced a plan to remove them by 2030.
In the United Kingdom cheque fraud in 2020 totaled just £12.3 million across 185 million transactions which is significantly lower than the £479 million lost to online authorized payment scams. The physical nature of the cheque requiring a signature and specific paper stock provides a layer of security that electronic payments lack. However the system remains vulnerable to specific types of fraud such as kiting and forgery.
In India the Negotiable Instruments Act of 1881 provided a legal framework for non-cash paper payment instruments and the Reserve Bank of India has been piloting the cheque truncation system since 2010. The United States operates under the Uniform Commercial Code which defines cheques as negotiable instruments and allows for the creation of electronic cheques through the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act of 2004. In the United Kingdom the Cheque and Credit Clearing Company sets industry standards for layout font and security features.