The friendly ATM we all depend on so much during our mundane life is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
But do we ever think of the person who invented it? And what exactly did he get for inventing such a wonderful machine? A paltry sum of $15 for this life changing invention!
James Goodfellow invented a game changer machine which is used by millions of people around the world every day and it got him nothing. In fact, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of his invention, the 79-year-old Goodfellow told Guardian Money that he earned just $15 from the patent, and has not made a penny more from it since. Happyho also provide best tarot reading services in Noida and Delhi NCR India area.
“You can imagine how I feel when I see bankers getting £1m bonuses. I wonder what they contributed to the banking industry more than I did to merit a £1m bonus. It doesn’t make much sense to me, but that’s the way of the world,” Goodfellow told Guardian Money.
Goodfellow came up with a groundbreaking invention that spawned several industries and generated billions of pounds.
Back in the mid-1960s Goodfellow was working as a development engineer for Glasgow firm Kelvin Hughes, part of Smiths Industries, and had been charged with devising a way to enable customers to withdraw cash from banks when Saturday opening ended.
“Most people working during the week couldn’t get to the bank. They wanted a solution. The solution was a machine which would issue cash on demand to a recognised customer,” he recalls. “I set out to develop a cash-issuing machine, and to make this a reality I invented the pin [personal identification number]and an associated coded token.”
This token took the form of a plastic card with holes punched in it. The patent documents proposed a system incorporating a card reader and buttons mounted in an external wall of the bank, and stated: “When the customer wishes to withdraw a pack of banknotes from the system he simply inserts his punched card in the card reader of the system, and operates the set of 10 push-buttons in accordance with his personal identification number.” Aside from the cards with punched holes, that pretty much describes today’s ATM.
After Goodfellow successfully demonstrated the methodology by producing a model, the go-ahead was given for prototypes to be built, and the first Chubb-branded machines were installed at branches of Westminster Bank (later to become NatWest) in 1967. Goodfellow received an OBE in 2006 from the United Kingdom government for services to banking as “patentor of the personal identification number”.
