Who invented the cash machine?

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/apr/29/who-invented-cash-machine-james-goodfellow-first-atm-pin

Article on who invented the ATM technology and when?

4 Comments

  1. Hilton Heidenreich says:

    Well, maybe you can google it because you will not find any solutions here.

    Reply
  2. Bernard Conde says:

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  3. Tomi Engdahl says:

    The man who really invented the cash machine
    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-40416025

    The world’s first ATM was unveiled 50 years ago today but the inventor of the bank cash machine has been a source of dispute for years, with two Scottish men claiming the credit.

    James Goodfellow, who will be 80 this year, is the man who first patented automated cash machines that use pin numbers – but for years the only credit he received was a £10 bonus.

    He lodged his patent in May 1966, more than a year before the first cash machine was ceremonially opened in a blaze of publicity.

    On 27 June 1967, comedy actor Reg Varney took money from a cash machine dispenser at a Barclays branch in Enfield, north London, but this was not the ATM card and Pin system we know today.

    This machine was developed by John Shepherd-Barron

    Shepherd-Barron’s ATM beat Goodfellow’s machines, which were installed at branches of Westminster Bank (later to become NatWest), by just a month.

    So Shepherd-Barron became known as the “man who invented the cash machine” and not Goodfellow, the man who patented the system we use today.

    The two devices were very different.

    Shepherd-Barron’s did not use plastic cards, instead it used cheques that were impregnated with carbon 14, a mildly radioactive substance.

    The machine detected it, then matched the cheque against a Pin (personal identification number).

    Shepherd-Barron worked for banknote manufacturer De La Rue, which never patented its machine.

    Before he died in 2010, he told a BBC documentary that he didn’t patent the idea because he did not want fraudsters knowing how the system worked.

    However, it is Mr Goodfellow’s plastic card and PIN which became the forerunner of the system we recognise today.

    In recent years, his claim to have been the real inventor of the cash machine has been recognised more widely.

    Mr Goodfellow now does not like to talk about the years in which Mr Shepherd-Barron got all the credit but in a 2009 BBC documentary he said it “really does raise my blood pressure”.

    The engineer, from Paisley, told BBC Scotland: “My patent was licensed by all the manufacturers. They thought that was the way to go.

    “The race to get it on to the street was not as important.

    “Getting it right was the answer, not getting it first.”

    Mr Goodfellow was working as development engineer for Glasgow firm Kelvin Hughes in the mid-1960s when he got involved in a project to design a machine that could dispense money to customers when banks were closed.

    He told BBC Scotland that the driving force for the move was unions putting pressure on banks to close on Saturday mornings.

    Many people went to the bank on Saturday mornings but the unions were pressing for staff to work a five-day week.

    Mr Goodfellow said: “The problem with cash machines was access.

    “How would a genuine customer, and only a genuine customer, get money out of it?”

    They considered biometrics – fingerprints, voice prints or retinal scans.

    “But in the 60s the technology to do this was not there, it was impossible,” Mr Goodfellow said.

    Eureka moment

    So the next approach was an “exotic token”, a piece of paper or plastic with “uncommon characteristics” that a machine would recognise.

    His “eureka moment” came when he hit upon the idea of the Personal Identification Number (PIN).

    This was the vital security measure that would make the system work, the number would be known to the customer and the bank and could be related to the card but not read by anyone else.

    Goodfellow’s invention was patented in May 1966, more than a year before his rival unveiled the first ATM in London.

    But he still had a battle to make his concept reality.

    “We had to meet some of the banks demands which were pretty severe,” he said.

    “They had a million customers and they wanted 2,000 machines across the UK.

    “They wanted any one of the one million customers to be able to access any one of the 2,000 machines.

    “You’ve got to remember there was no IT network in those days. The banks had no IT equipment. The bank’s branches had nothing.

    “We spent a lot of time developing the code. We had to submit something like 1,000 of these cards to a consultant, who would try to decipher it.”

    Inventor of the ATM

    The cards he used were one quarter of a “Hollerith” punch-card, which just happens to be the same size as today’s credit card. It contains just 30 bytes of data.

    His patent for the card and Pin ATM was licensed for millions but Mr Goodfellow, as a humble technician, did not own the rights and did not get rich from his invention.

    He said he signed patents for 15 countries around the world and got a dollar for each – worth about £10.

    In 2005, Mr Shepherd-Barron received an OBE in the New Year honours list for services to banking as the “inventor of the automatic cash dispenser”.

    However, since then Mr Goodfellow, the man who patented the invention, has regained his place.

    In 2006 Mr Goodfellow received an OBE for services to banking as “patentor of the personal identification number”.

    Reply
  4. Kendrick says:

    Thanks for this info

    Reply

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