The History of the ATM: Radioactive Checks, PINs and Jackpotting Heists

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In 1961 an inventor named Luther Simjian put an automated banking machine on a New York City street, and the public ignored it so thoroughly that the bank removed it after six months. His Bankograph only accepted deposits, and few people would hand a paycheck to a metal box. This episode traces the messy birth of the automated teller machine: a 1966 Japanese device that dispensed cash as a three-month loan at 5 percent interest, and the 1967 Barclays dispenser in North London, which John Shepherd-Barron modeled on a chocolate bar vending machine and which read paper checks laced with carbon-14.

From there the story turns to trust. James Goodfellow separated identity from security with the personal identification number, Docutel and Chemical Bank brought the machine to Rockville Centre, New York in 1969, and Mohamed Atalla's hardware security module scrambled PINs before they traveled over phone lines. By 2015 there were roughly 3.5 million ATMs worldwide. The episode follows what that did to bank jobs, how thieves attacked the machines, and why the network is now shrinking.

• Actor Reg Varney made the first withdrawal for the press, and a sensor inside the machine verified each check by its radioactive pattern.
• The world's highest ATM sits at the Khunjerab Pass in Pakistan, over 15,000 feet up, in temperatures that fall to minus 40 degrees Celsius.
• US bank tellers doubled from roughly 300,000 in 1970 to about 600,000 in 2010, because cheaper branches meant banks opened far more of them.
• In jackpotting, thieves drill into the casing, guide an endoscope to the internal computer, swap in their own drive, and make the machine empty itself.
• In 1996, Andrew Stone filmed card numbers and PINs from a distance and stole over one million pounds with cloned cards before he was caught.