James Shepherd-Barron
Latest posts by James Shepherd-Barron (see all)
- HOT FROGS and the monetization of money - 3rd March 2021
- CoVid Lessons Un-Learned - 29th January 2021
- HOLE IN THE WALL (Book Extract) - 18th January 2021
The US banking industry recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the world’s first Automated Teller Machine, or ATM. Don Wetzl, its putative ‘inventor’, was feted on Wall Street and the American public was once more reminded of its entrepreneurial genius and capital clout.
Unfortunately, however, those with short memories will have forgotten the slightly inconvenient truth that the ATM Industry Association, the recognised international body that represents ATM manufacturers and distributors around the world, already celebrated the ATM’s 50th birthday two years ago, on 25th June 2017.
So, why are we witnessing a repeat exercise? Why are we having another ‘Groundhog Day’ moment?
The answer, as everyone in the cash management industry is too bored or too embarrassed to admit, is that there are many competing claims as to who invented the ATM … and much of their industry with it.
In an attempt to explain why this is the case, let me, son of the man whom the ATM Industry Association has endorsed as ‘The Inventor of the ATM’, John Shepherd-Barron, shed some light on why there is such confusion over the issue.
The explanation is really quite simple and is outlined in some detail in my book on his life, Hole in the Wall – Memoirs of a Cash Machine: The British company for whom my father worked, De La Rue Instruments, unveiled the world’s first functioning 24/7 cash dispenser on 27th June 1967, beating Japanese, Swedish and US rivals to the accolade. Although there are some who quibble about the timeline, this much is indisputable. Somewhere down the line, however, De La Rue took a deliberate decision not to patent the device, arguing that to publish details of exactly how the dispensing mechanism worked – a complicated system involving light sensors, punched holes and radioactive ink – would have been an open invitation to fraudsters.
This allowed one of the partners involved in the ATM’s early development with De La Rue, the British bank National Westminster, to pre-empt the criminal underworld by stealing the technology itself, passing it to one of their client companies, Smiths Industries, who promptly did file for patent. One of the names on that patent was James Goodfellow, a Scottish engineer currently living outside Glasgow, a man who, quite understandably, has subsequently himself laid claim to being the ATM’s inventor. As an engineer responsible for further developing the system we more or less use today, it’s quite possible he’s right and he is the ATM’s de-facto inventor. But that depends not just on the historical record and how patent law is interpreted, but on how the word ‘invention’ is defined; for to develop someone else’s idea is not invention, but innovation.
Notably absent through this remarkable yet potentially acrimonious story is any mention of American engineering talent. But, as usual, they were far from asleep, developing these British ideas further and faster than any European company was able to do, and bringing the concept to scale in a way that the rest of the world has never been able to match. This is where Don Wetzl, former Docutel engineer and hero of Wall Street, comes in. The Japanese and the Scandinavians were involved in the De La Rue developmental process from the outset, and it is inconceivable that anybody in the world of banking and cash management at that time – an explosive decade of post-war transformation, disruption and technological innovation – would have been unaware of what the competition was up to.
Ultimately, though, what my father and his British team at De La Rue invented was a cash dispenser; a glorified vending machine which, to the public at least, lay somewhere between a chocolate bar dispenser and the household fridge-freezer in terms of social utility. But it was a vending machine with a difference; it demanded human interaction and authentication in the form of the personal identification number, or PIN. In this, it was genuinely a world first.
The ATM we know today came a few years later, courtesy of Don Wetzl, Chemical Bank, and others in the US banking industry. And so, I suppose, it’s quite fair for the Americans to claim that it is they, not the British, who ‘invented’ the ATM. After all, the British referred to bank clerks as cashiers, not tellers, which probably tells you everything you need to know. But, when all is said and done, it was my father who came up with the idea and led the team that produced the world’s first working cash dispenser, later to evolve into the ATM we know today.
For further information contact ‘[email protected]’
James Shepherd-Barron is the son of the inventor of the world’s first cash dispensing machine and author of Hole in the Wall – Memoirs of a Cash Machine, the true and previously untold story of how the ATM was invented.