The bank closed at three and I've got no cash for the weekend

Payday's Friday. The bank's open till three. I work till five. — Machinist, 1964

The cash machine usually called the first went into a Barclays branch in Enfield, in north London, on June 27, 1967. Nobody had a bank card yet, so you fed it a paper cheque treated with a mildly radioactive material, carbon-14, and punched in a number. It paid out ten pounds at a time. John Shepherd-Barron, the man usually credited, said the idea came from a chocolate bar machine. The bank wouldn't stay open, so he built a machine that never closes. Smart man.

Noted: the usual PIN is four digits because, as he told it, his wife couldn't remember six.

The full file

Shepherd-Barron wasn't alone, and the banks knew it. Several teams were working on the same machine at once. A Swedish one went in about a week after Barclays', and Westminster Bank had one a month later. A machine called the Bankograph was out in 1960, but it was a deposit machine. So "first" is a crowded claim, and Enfield is the one that gets the credit.

The PIN is argued over too. When Shepherd-Barron died in 2010, one trade site credited an engineer named James Goodfellow with inventing the PIN method, and noted he was given an OBE for it in 2006. Shepherd-Barron's own account was that he had planned six digits.

Barclays says Britain now has about 70,000 machines, each paying out something like two and a half million pounds a year. America has more than 420,000, according to a federal count.

Plenty of people built one. One got the credit.