John Shepherd-Barron
John Shepherd-Barron (born June 23, 1925 in Shillong , Meghalaya , Assam , † May 15, 2010 in Inverness ) was a Scottish inventor. In the 1960s he developed the ATM .
Life
Shepherd-Barron was the son of Wilfred Shepherd-Barron (1888–1979), who initially held important positions as an engineer in India and Pakistan as an army officer (chief engineer of the Chittagong Port Commissioners) and later head of the Port of London Authority and later of the Institute of Civil Engineers. His mother was the Wimbledon winner Dorothy Shepherd-Barron . He studied history and economics at the University of Edinburgh and the Trinity College of Cambridge University . During World War II he was a paratrooper in India, Burma and the Middle East . In 1950 he started as a management trainee at De La Rue, which among other things printed banknotes and stocks. 1957 to 1959 he built the US business as regional director. In 1963 he became head of De La Rue's start-up “Security Express” (money transport for banks in Great Britain).
In 1965 he developed the first automated teller machine (ATM) at De La Rue Instruments, the first of which went into operation on June 27, 1967 for Barclays Bank in Enfield, north London. Shepherd-Barron got the idea in the bathtub after arriving late at the bank one Saturday and unable to withdraw anything for the weekend. Its model were self-service machines for chocolate. In a conversation in 1965 he suggested the introduction of such a machine to the managing director of Barclays Bank. At that time, no magnetic card was used for identification, but a check whose identification number was impregnated with radioactive C14 and which was then retained by the machine. A maximum of £ 10 was paid out. Originally, Shepherd-Barron wanted to use six-digit identification numbers because that was too much for his wife (she told him she could only remember four-digit numbers), so he used four-digit numbers. The PIN keypad itself was invented by the Scot James Goodfellow (* 1937) (and patented in 1966), who invented an ATM around 1965 at the same time as Shepherd-Barron, which was installed later.
He later served as the CEO of Ross and Cromarty Enterprise. In 1985 he retired.
Other inventions by Shepherd-Barron were less successful. For example, he invented a device that mimicked the call of killer whales to protect salmon farms in the sea. In retirement he ran a snail farm.
He had been married to Caroline Murray (daughter of a chairman of the Bank of Scotland) since 1953 and had three sons, including the mathematician Nicholas Shepherd-Barron .
In 2004 he became OBE . He received the ATM Industry Association's Lifetime Achievement Award.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Interview in BBC Radio 2007
- ↑ There have been attempts at ATMs before, for example a mechanical machine from the City Bank in New York City in 1939 , which was discontinued due to lack of interest. ATMs were also developed in the USA in the mid-1960s (Donald Wetzel, Docutel), but they were not installed until 1971.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Shepherd-Barron, John |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British inventor, developer of the ATM |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 23, 1925 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Shillong , Meghalaya , Assam |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 15, 2010 |
| Place of death | Inverness |