History of ATM

The first mechanical cash dispenser was developed and built by Luther George Simjian and installed in 1939 in New York City by the City Bank of New York, but removed after 6 months due to the lack of customer acceptance.

Thereafter, the history of ATMs paused for over 25 years, until De La Rue developed the first electronic ATM, which was installed first in Enfield Town in North London, United Kingdom on 27 June 1967 by Barclays Bank. This instance of the invention is credited to John Shepherd-Barron, although various other engineers were awarded patents for related technologies at the time.Shepherd-Barron was awarded an OBE in the 2005 New Year's Honours List.The first person to use the machine was the British variety artist and actor Reg Varney.The first ATMs accepted only a single-use token or voucher, which was retained by the machine. These worked on various principles including radiation and low-coercivity magnetism that was wiped by the card reader to make fraud more difficult.The machine dispensed pre-packaged envelopes containing ten pounds sterling. The idea of a PIN stored on the card was developed by the British engineer James Goodfellow in 1965.

In 1968 the networked ATM was pioneered in Dallas, Texas, by Donald Wetzel who was a department head at an automated baggage-handling company called Docutel. In 1995 the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History recognised Docutel and Wetzel as the inventors of the networked ATM.

ATMs first came into wide UK use in 1973; the IBM 2984 was designed at the request of Lloyds Bank. The 2984 CIT (Cash Issuing Terminal) was the first true Cashpoint, similar in function to today's machines; Cashpoint is still a registered trademark of Lloyds TSB in the U.K. All were online and issued a variable amount which was immediately deducted from the account. A small number of 2984s were supplied to a US bank. Notable historical models of ATMs include the IBM 3624 and 473x series, Diebold 10xx and TABS 9000 series, and NCR 5xxx series.