The ATM, the crazy invention bankers made fun of, turns 50

Nowadays it is unthinkable to walk down the street and not find almost an ATM in every corner (well, in recent years they have descended with the proliferation of the use of credit cards and banking and online payment applications). But 50 years ago, it was an invention that all bankers rejected because they didn't find it useful. This had to deal with Donald Wetzel, who was called crazy.

With 40 years Wetzel had the idea, it was a Friday in 1968. He needed money to travel but the long line of customers left the bank. The clock almost struck five in the afternoon and was about to close. "The majority of those who were waiting had gone to get money and did not understand how there was no machine to do that job. In addition, customers could use it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He thought it was a good way of doing business and got to work.

That was the beginning of ATMs, which would change the way in which customers interacted with the bank. It took Wetzel almost a year to launch the first and it was presented on September 2, 1969 with the first "cash box" at a branch of the Chemical Bank in Rockville Center, in Long Island.

"I wanted something to be used with a transportable card, something we could store in our pockets." For that I needed a mechanism that was safe enough to carry out the transactions. And the success was the creation of the magnetic strip. "If you are going to have this machine outside a bank with hundreds of dollars inside, we had to convince the bank that nobody would be able to enter," he told Fox News.

Wetzel, who had previously worked for IBM and Docutel, developed the magnetic stripe to maintain the Personal Identification Number (PIN). "That gave us the security we needed," he said. "Then came the development of a printer and a device that would take out the cash and a small instrument that would instruct the user. But the magnetic stripe was the real key to the success of the ATM," he recalls.

However, marketing your invention was not easy. During the first years, Wetzel assumed the commercial role. He had to call door to door to present the product. Almost all the bankers laughed at his revolutionary invention: "They thought I was crazy. They said, do you mean an ATM that anyone could approach and use? We don't see it. We have ATMs that do that."

In a few years, the functions of the ATM were expanded so that customers could check the balance of their accounts and as the technology developed, the ATMs connected with each other. Today, there are about 3.5 million ATMs installed worldwide.

But even though Wetzel invented the ATM, his wife has never used one: "I am ashamed to say that my wife has never used an ATM. Eleanor was busy being a mother and was afraid to put her card in the machine and not retrieve it He never had the desire to use one and never changed his mind, ”Wetzel acknowledged that he is still a co-owner of the ATM patent, which is filed with the Smithsonian Museum.