Good morning,
Whitewater’s forecast for Thursday calls for thunderstorms with a high of eighty-one degrees.
The History Channel reports that on this day in 1969, a major convenience for American consumers made its appearance:
On this day in 1969, America’s first automatic teller machine (ATM) makes its public debut, dispensing cash to customers at Chemical Bank in Rockville Center, New York. ATMs went on to revolutionize the banking industry, eliminating the need to visit a bank to conduct basic financial transactions. By the 1980s, these money machines had become widely popular and handled many of the functions previously performed by human tellers, such as check deposits and money transfers between accounts. Today, ATMs are as indispensable to most people as cell phones and e-mail.
There was, however, an even earlier version, pulled for unpopularity:
In the USA, Luther George Simjian has been credited with developing and building the first cash dispenser machine. There is strong evidence to suggest that Simjian worked on this device before 1959 while his 132nd patent (US3079603) was first filed on 30 June 1960 (and granted 26 February 1963). The rollout of this machine, called Bankograph, was delayed a couple of years. This was due in part to Simjian’s Reflectone Electronics Inc. being acquired by Universal Match Corporation. An experimental Bankograph was installed in New York City in 1961 by the City Bank of New York, but removed after 6 months due to the lack of customer acceptance. The Bankograph was an automated envelope deposit machine (accepting coins, cash and cheques) and it did not have cash dispensing features. The Bankograph, however, embodied the preoccupation by US banks in finding alternative means to capture core deposits, while the concern of European and Asian banks was cash distribution.