You probably missed it, but May 15, 2010 marked the passing of John Shepherd-Barron, 84, a Scotsman credited as the inventor of the first ATM (automated teller machine). The idea came to him after he had to go a whole weekend without cash because he was one minute late getting to his bank branch one Saturday morning. Rather than bang on the door and fly into a rage as would happen in, say, New York, Mr. Shepherd-Barron instead went home, took a bath and imagined a machine that would give cash in the same fashion as a candy machine. Many young people today think of an ATM as a candy machine. Mr. Shepherd-Barron was obviously ahead of his time.
The first ATM was installed at Barclay’s Bank, London, in 1967. It required a punch card, because plastic cards with magnetic stripes had not yet been invented. In fact, even most credit cards hadn’t been invented yet. If you needed credit and wanted to pay usurious interest rates you still had to go to a mafia loan shark. Obviously technology has made life considerably more convenient since then. The first ATM would only give out $14.00 at a time, and that was a puzzle because in England they used Pounds Sterling notes. However, $14.00 in those days was worth considerably more than today. It wasn’t enough for a down payment on a house like in the 1950’s, but you could get a pretty nice meal at a restaurant and still have change for a movie, a newspaper, a quart of milk, a loaf of bread and a pack of smokes. Even lung cancer was cheaper in those days.
It’s sad that Mr. Shepherd-Barron never made any money on his invention and reportedly put his last $14.00 into the demo model. We’re not entirely sure if that was because he was feeling generous and gave his invention away or if it was because the bankers were, well, bankers. In order to promote the use of ATM machines, banks started getting rid of tellers and closing walk-in branches. They discovered that rather than pay for an actual building with people in it, they could collect fees with a little machine set into the side of someone else’s building. They also developed sophisticated installation techniques, such as making sure the ATM screen was facing the sun so you might input the wrong numbers and incur a fee. ATMs were also frequently placed in areas exposed to the weather. On a windy day a customer might have to try several times, and incur several fees, to get cash from the slot before the wind blew it away. You can always count on banks to be clever innovators.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of ATMs was the disappearance of people who worked in banks. Most boomers can remember walking into a bank and having someone actually count bills in front of them. Today we have to take it on faith that the mechanical arm inside an ATM isn’t skimming off the top. A dollar here and a dollar there can add up quickly and what can the police do anyway? Arrest the machine? Put handcuffs on its little robot arm and haul it off to the slammer? No, not likely. ATMs are pretty much untouchable. If you doubt this, try to cancel a transaction and get your fee back.
The other thing Mr. Shepherd-Barron came up with was the PIN (personal identification number) used to identify who you are when you use an ATM machine. This of course was the start of today’s runaway use of pins, logons, and id’s with every type of device imaginable. Do you want to lock your kids or grandkids out of the TV set? Use a PIN, same for e-mail and cell phones. This in turn has created big problems trying to remember all the PINs. People have had to go without TV, e-mail or a cell phones for weeks because they couldn’t remember their PINs and were locked out. Mr. Shepherd-Barron devised a PIN that required six numbers, but his wife made him cut it back to four because she couldn’t remember the codes herself.
According to industry statistics there are now over two million ATMs installed worldwide, but there is some irony that ATMs are facing job pressures as cell phones take over more and more banking transactions. You can now use a cell phone to take a picture of a check for a deposit. If it’s a bad check a picture of a cop comes back on your phone and tells you to report to a police station. So, we offer a final tribute from the boomer generation to John Shepherd-Barron. Like so many other inventors, he changed our lives but never received credit, or even a debit card, for his contribution. Well, he did get a medal from the Queen in 2004, but that was just because she was so happy with an ATM installed for the Royal Family that only gave out $14.00 at a time.
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