John Shepherd-Barron

John Adrian Shepherd-Barron, OBE (23 June 1925 – 15 May 2010^[1]) was a British inventor, who pioneered the development of the cash machine, sometimes referred to as the Automated Teller Machine or ATM.

Early life

John Adrian Shepherd-Barron was born on 23 June 1925 at Shillong, then in the British Raj province of Assam (now in Meghalaya), to British parents. His Scottish father, Wilfred Shepherd-Barron, was chief engineer of the Chittagong Port Commissioners in North Bengal (later became Pakistan, now Bangladesh), which was then part of the British Empire, then later Chief Engineer of the Port of London Authority, before becoming president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, whilst his mother Dorothy, was an Olympic tennis player and Wimbledon ladies doubles champion.^[2] Shepherd-Barron was educated at Stowe School, the University of Edinburgh and Trinity College, Cambridge (from where he dropped out before successfully finishing the first year in Economics). During World War II, he was commissioned into the Airborne Forces, serving with the 159th Parachute Light Regiment.^[2]

Career

Shepherd-Barron joined De La Rue in the 1950s as a management trainee and grew to become Managing Director of De La Rue Instruments (with a mandate to run down the company). Under his leadership the first De La Rue Automated Cash System (DACS) machine became operational outside the Enfield, north London, branch of Barclays Bank in June 1967.^[3] He received the Order of the British Empire in the 2005 New Year's Honours list for services to banking as "inventor of the automatic cash dispenser".^[4] Shepherd-Barron told the BBC that he was inspired by chocolate vending machines.^[3]

Scottish inventor James Goodfellow was intimately involved in the development of an alternative cash dispenser design, using PIN technology (which he invented while working at Smiths Industries at the request of Chubb Locks and patented with Anthony Davies as GB1197183 and US3905461). This PIN sequence was cited by subsequent patents as "prior art device" and resembled modern ATMs more than Shepherd-Barron's machine.^[5] However, Shepherd-Barron's machine (the idea for which he claimed to have had in the bath, after having been locked out of his bank)^[6][7] was the first to be installed (but only for a few days).

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, which was detected and matched against the personal identification number (PIN) entered on a keypad. The short-range beta emission from carbon-14 could be easily detected, and he determined that the radiation hazard was acceptable as "you would have to eat 136,000 such cheques for it to have any effect on you".^[3] A proposed PIN length of 6 digits was rejected and 4 digits chosen instead, because it was the longest string of numbers that his wife could remember.^[3]

Personal life

His son, Nicholas Shepherd-Barron FRS, is professor of algebraic geometry at the King's College London.^[8]

John died on 15 May 2010 after a brief illness at the age of 84 in Raigmore Hospital, Inverness, Scotland.^[1][9]

References