The Punched Cash Card
1967 · Plastic Cash Card with Coded Holes · Work 755 of 1,871
A plastic cash card of 1967 held in a man's hand before the stone front of a bank branch in London on a summer evening, the card a small rectangle of stiff pale plastic eight and a half by five and a half centimetres with rounded corners and a pattern of small round holes, held upright between thumb and fingers, its plain back side toward the lens, evening light showing through the holes as tiny bright dots, a beige raincoat sleeve at the wrist, behind the hand, soft in focus, a wall of pale limestone blocks with a plain flat brushed-metal panel set flush in the stone with one narrow dark slot, warm street-lamp light from the right.
- What it was used for
- The punched card was the key to the cash dispenser: the customer was issued a set of cards, inserted one and keyed in a personal number. NatWest Group's archive describes it: the card was "retained by the machine", posted by hand by bank staff and only then returned for reuse; 10 pounds were paid out. Each card was thus a single voucher, not a lasting credential — the machine did not know the balance. The Engineering Hall of Fame names James Goodfellow, a development engineer at Smiths Industries, who was given the project in 1965; on that account Chubb Lock & Safe supplied the secure housing and the mechanical dispenser.
- What was new
- What was new was the pairing of a machine-readable card with a number learned by heart: the device checked not the person but the agreement of two things, one of which is not carried. The Engineering Hall of Fame cites British patent 1,197,183 with a priority date of 2 May 1966 and names A. I. O. Davies as co-inventor alongside Goodfellow — a priority date, not a grant. The barb: NatWest had 75 machines by spring 1969 — and every withdrawal produced a card that a person had to post by hand.
What the sources leave open: The punched card in NatWest Group's archive dates from 1969 and was issued by the Broomhill branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland; according to the ATM Industry Association, Chubb's machine for the Westminster Bank was deployed in 1967.