Friday, June 29, 2018

50 years of ATMs.

Today's the 50th anniversary of the ATM(Automatic Teller Machine), the beloved cash point with its multiple functions. It's become an indispensable part of life, worldwide.

John Shepherd-Barron once explained that he'd come up with the idea of cash dispensers in '65 while lying in his bath after finding his bank closed. It was then his habit to withdraw money on a Saturday but on this particular weekend he had arrived one minute late and found the bank doors locked against him.

Later that year, he bumped into the chief general manager of Barclays Bank who was about to have lunch. Over a pink gin, Shepherd-Barron asked him for 90 seconds to pitch his idea for a cash machine.

"I told him that I had an idea that if you put your standard Barclays cheque through a slot in the side of the bank, it will deliver standard amounts of money around the clock. He said, 'Come and see me on Monday morning'."

Barclays commissioned Shepherd-Barron to build six cash dispensers, the first of which was installed at a branch in the north London suburb of Enfield on 27 Jun '67.

Shepherd-Barron was born in Shillong, India in '25 and later served in the Indian Army in the Second Airborne Division where he taught the Gurkhas to parachute. He also invented the PIN by recalling his Indian Army number. He had originally intended to make personal identification numbers(PIN) six digits long but reduced the number to four when his wife, Caroline, complained that six was too many. "Over the kitchen table, she said she could only remember four figures, so because of her, four figures became the world standard," he recalled.

All this was possible due to the efforts, decades earlier, of a mathematical prodigy by the name of Srinivasa Ramanujan - a mathematical genius of India.

Unconventional Ramanujan had no formal training in Mathematics and could not get further education in Madras University. His English boss at the Madras Port Trust encouraged him to write to Prof Hardy of Trinity College Cambridge. He wrote a big letter with his equations which held Hardy's interest and he secured him an admission without necessary prerequisites or the hard Tripos Exam.

He would have not made it to Cambridge and world fame, if rules were not broken for him and at Trinity College, he came up with the "Partition Theory".

He was the one of the earliest and the youngest Indian to be awarded the Fellow of the Royal Society!

When you put your debit or credit card in the machine and order the machine to dispense with the amount of your desire, the machine divides and arranges your money before dispensing it, using Ramanujan's partition theory.

A partition of a positive integer, 'n', is just an expression for 'n' as a sum of positive integers, regardless of order. Thus p(4) = 5 because 4 can be written as 1+1+1+1, 1+1+2, 2+2, 1+3 or 4.

The ATM arranges the correct money, to be dispensed with, according to Ramanujan's Partition Theory.

Salute to these two fine gentlemen!



Tailpiece.

Had gone to the bank to transfer my contribution towards the building of a house for a poor couple in my village, Thalavoor that consists of an elderly, jobless widow and her mentally retarded son, aged 26 years. They were living under plastic sheets all this while and it was Sasikala, an energetic local Congress woman and my mom's friend who spearheads this philanthropic activity of building a 'pucca' house for them. She'd solicited my support, in this project, during my last visit.















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