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Culture

The history of self-service
September 7, 2020
Autoatención

Nowadays, a world without self-service devices or ATMs seems unthinkable. However, this was not always the case. In this article, we'll discover the fascinating story of how these modern essentials came to be.

Vending machines

The concept of automatic self-service is not as recent as you might think. The world's first vending machine is said to have been designed in ancient Egypt by Heron of Alexandria. It was located outside temples, and its purpose was to dispense holy water in exchange for coins. This device, although rudimentary, did its job: serving parishioners and generating profits without the need for a middleman.

The full potential of this invention would not be realized for many centuries, until the era of the Industrial Revolution. Various sources indicate that it was in 1880 that the first postcard vending machine was installed in London. These machines quickly gained prominence in Europe over a period of a few years, and in 1888 the Thomas Adams Gum Company introduced the first gumball machine to the New York subway.

Restaurants

In the year 1895 in Berlin, Quisisana was opened, the first automatic restaurant in the world to offer its dishes through self-service devices. This idea, so innovative for its time, was replicated in 1902 in the United States with the opening of the Automat, a fast food restaurant that would remain in operation until 1962. So the evolution in sales and customer service continued to spread with the increasingly popular use of vending machines for sweets, cigars, soft drinks, coffee, and even perfume during the first three decades of the 20th century.

ATMs

Almost a decade later, the first known ATM would appear in the West. This apparatus was developed in 1939 by the Armenian Luther George Simjian. After emigrating to New York, Simjian would dedicate his life to the invention of technological devices. He registered the patent for approximately 20 prototype machines, and partnered with Citicorp to carry out their implementation. However, these prototypes were not successful. Interestingly, this failure was not due to technical problems with the device, but to the fact that they were ahead of their time: few people used the new devices, and they were discontinued.

Shortly afterward, the second World War began, and subsequent development of the ATM was abandoned until the end of the conflict. Fittingly, the success of the ATM arose from the daily needs of an ordinary person. When a Scottish man named John Shepherd-Barron traveled to the city to cash a check, he found the branch closed and could not carry out his transaction. Annoyed by the situation, he conceived of a machine that, like the vending machines that already existed at that time, could exchange his checks for money at any time of the day. John Shepherd-Barron was able to finance his project and commercialize it with the help of the De La Rue company, and in July 1967 he installed the first successful ATM in London.

Secure transactions

John Shepherd-Barron's ATM contained innovative security mechanisms for its time. Checks saturated with carbon-14 were issued for 10 pounds each, and these had to be requested by the user in advance at the bank, at which time the amount was deducted from their account. However, Shepherd-Barron believed that for greater security, there should be a numerical password assigned to each user. To help users remember their passwords, his wife Caroline Shepherd-Barron proposed that they be four digits each, thus creating the four-digit PIN (Personal Identification Number) which became a worldwide standard.

Five months later, ATMs were introduced in Zurich, which became the third city to install the machines. Improvements were made over the next decade, as these early prototypes were only suitable for use by a limited number of users. The old method of authenticating checks by saturating them in radioactive material soon fell into disuse, and with the development of electronic components, bank cards appeared from 1985 onwards. This technology was able to advance further with the advent of the Internet, an advance to which we owe the convenience and benefits of automatic service in our lives today.

How do you imagine our life would be without these useful devices?

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