..... your money or your life!
Last week saw the fiftieth
anniversary of the first ATM machine transaction.
On June 27 1967, “On the Buses”
star Reg Varney made the very first withdrawal from the world's first
voucher-based cash dispensing machine outside the Enfield Town branch of
Barclays Bank.
The ATM was the brainchild of John
Shepherd-Barron who worked for De La Rue the printer of bank notes.
In 1965, accompanied by his 7 year
old son James, he approached his bank in Dorking High Street to withdraw cash
and the bank door slammed shut in his face. James recalls that it was the only
time he ever heard his father swear. His father immediately said “I can’t allow
this to happen! Its Saturday morning, I need cash and the bank door has shut in
my face, so let’s make cash available 24 hours a day”.
Later while taking a bath and considering the problem of bank opening hours he conceived the idea for a self-service
machine dispensing cash. Shepherd-Barron recalled in BBC interview that he was
inspired by chocolate vending machines: "It struck me there must be a way
I could get my own money, anywhere in the world or the UK. I hit upon the idea
of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash.”
He and fellow engineers at De la
Rue devised a prototype and obtained funding.
Later that year, he bumped into
the chief general manager of Barclays Bank who was about to have lunch. Over a
pink gin, Shepherd-Barron asked him for 90 seconds to pitch his idea for a cash
machine.
"I told him I had an idea
that if you put your standard Barclays cheque through a slot in the side of the
bank, it will deliver standard amounts of money around the clock.
"He said, 'Come and see me
on Monday morning'."
Barclays commissioned
Shepherd-Barron to build six cash dispensers, the first of which was installed
at a branch in the north London suburb of Enfield 1967 with the others rolled
out later that year in Hove, Ipswich, Luton, Peterborough and Southend.
It is estimated that today there
are over 3 million ATM machines installed throughout the world.
Shepherd-Barron tested the
prototype at home with his family initially proposing a PIN length of six
digits based on his army number but his wife Caroline complained that six was
too many and the longest string of numbers that she could remember was four.
As
a result four-digit PINs were chosen and as ATMs expanded across the globe,
this became the world standard.
Back in sixties bank cards
bearing magnetic strips were not invented. Shepherd-Barron's early machines
used special cheques that were chemically coded by being impregnated with
carbon-14, a mildly radioactive substance. Customers placed the cheque in a
drawer, the machine detected the material and matched the cheque against a PIN
before paying out a maximum of £10 a time which, according to Shepherd-Barron,
was "quite enough for a wild weekend"!
For his services to banking as
"inventor of the automatic cash dispenser", John Shepherd-Barron
received the Order of the British Empire in the 2005 New Year's Honours list.
He died on 15 May 2010 after a brief illness at the age of 84 in Raigmore
Hospital, Inverness, Scotland.
I’ll give the last word to a bespectacled
Stuart Leslie Goddard (aka Adam Ant)!
Hey Ho!
