ATM Inventor Born in Meghalaya

By Mr Narendra Dev

The hospital in Meghalaya, where ATM inventor John Adrian Shepherd-Barron was born in 1925, has got an automated teller machine after 53 years of the first installation of such a cash dispenser globally. The ATM was installed at Dr H Gordon Roberts Hospital, which will turn 100 next year. The teller machine was installed on August 7 after a petition was submitted to State Bank of India for setting up an ATM on the premises before the centennial celebrations next year, Medical Superintendent of the hospital Dr Roken Nongrum said.

Though ATMs are everywhere in India, the first one was set up in 1987 by HSBC in Mumbai. In the following years, hundreds of such all-time machines mostly dispensing cash, have become part of life ending long queues in the bank. But few know that the inventor of this very essential machine though a British was born in Meghalaya.

John Adrian Shepherd-Barron was an Indian born British inventor, who led the team that installed the first cash machine. He was born in 1925 at Dr.H.Gordon Roberts Hospital, Shillong , to British parents. His Scottish father, Wilfred Shepherd-Barron, was president of the Institution of Civil Engineers before working as Chief Engineers in Chittagong Port Commissioner in North Bengal. His mother Dorothy was an Olympic tennis player and Wimbledon ladies’ doubles champion. But he himself was a school dropout. But later he joined De La Rue in the 1950s as a management trainee and grew to become Managing Director of De La Rue Instruments.

The hospital in Meghalaya, where ATM inventor John Adrian Shepherd-Barron was born in 1925, has got an automated teller machine after 53 years of the first installation of such a cash dispenser globally.

The ATM was installed at Dr H Gordon Roberts Hospital, which will turn 100 next year. The teller machine was installed on August 7 after a petition was submitted to State Bank of India for setting up an ATM on the premises before the centennial celebrations next year, Medical Superintendent of the hospital Dr Roken Nongrum said.

Shepherd-Barron conceived the idea for a self-service machine dispensing cash whilst lying in the bath.

He was considering the problem of bank opening hours, having turned up at a bank after closing time one day and found himself unable to withdraw money.

Shepherd-Barron has stated that he was first inspired by chocolate vending machines: He hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser but replacing chocolate with cash. He pitched the idea to the head of Barclays Bank over a pink gin.

The first De La Rue Automatic Cash System (DACS) machine, called Barclaycash, was installed outside the Enfield branch of Barclays Bank in north London in June 1967. The first person to withdraw cash was actor Reg Varney, a celebrity resident of Enfield known for his part in several popular television series. An early deployment of this device outside of the UK took place in Zurich in 1967. It was called “Geldautomat”.

The DACS machines used cheque-like tokens (which were guillotined to the size of a normal cheque inside the machine) which had been impregnated with a radioactive compound of carbon-14. The radioactive signal was detected by the machine and matched against the personal identification number (PIN) entered on a keypad.

Initially, a PIN length of six digits was proposed; Shepherd- Barron tested this system on his wife, Caroline, but found that 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 till date. Withdrawals from the first Barclaycash machines were limited to a maximum of £10, quite enough for a wild weekend then.

Various rival cash dispenser systems quickly began to emerge. Another Scottish inventor, James Goodfellow, who was working at Smiths Industries, was commissioned by Chubb Locks to work on a new cash machine. Together with Anthony Davies, he developed a new system whereby the user’s PIN could be stored on a reusable bank card, rather than on single-use cheques. The system was patented as GB1197183 and US3905461 and was cited by subsequent patents as a “prior art device”. Goodfellow’s PIN system resembled modern ATMs more than Shepherd-Barron’s machine. However, Shepherd-Barron’s machine was the first to be installed, if only for a few days.

Shepherd-Barron died on 15 May 2010 after a brief illness at the age of 84 in Raigmore Hospital, Inverness, Scotland. He received the O.B.E. in the 2005 New Year’s Honours list for services to banking as “inventor of the automatic cash dispenser”