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Cash machines celebrate 40 years of doling out money

Cash machines across the world were handing out an estimated US$26 billion on Wednesday, business as usual for contraptions now celebrating 40 years of doling out cash to strangers on street.

Although cash machines have a long pedigree -- one version of the device was set up in New York in 1939 -- the first recognizably modern one was set up outside the Barclays PLC branch in Enfield, a north London suburb, on June 27, 1967, the bank said.

Customers were supplied with special single use vouchers which they would place into a drawer. After entering a personal identification number, a second drawer would spring open with a ?10 note.

locked out

John Shepherd Barron, the machine's inventor, said he came up with the idea after being locked out of his bank. Barron originally planned to make personal identification numbers six digits long, but cut the number to four after his wife Caroline complained that six were too many.

By the end of the 1960s there were 781 cash machines -- also known as automatic teller machines -- across the world, most of them in Britain, Barclays said.

Before long the machines were linked by a series of bank networks, enabling customers of one bank to withdraw money from another bank's ATM.

The machines are now used to remotely access bank statements, make transfers and even recharge cellphone credits.

south pole

There are some 1.5 million ATMs across the globe -- about 400,000 of them in the US, the ATM Industry Association said. They see an estimated 165 million withdrawals daily, according to Retail Banking Research.

One of the most remote is at the McMurdo station at the South Pole, where it serves a small population of Arctic researchers.
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