And finally…‘I got paid just £10’, says Scottish inventor of ATM

While Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg is now worth an estimated $50 billion, 79-year-old James Goodfellow told Guardian Money that he earned just $15 (around £10) and has not made a penny more since from the patent for a machine which is used by millions of people around the world every day.

“You can imagine how I feel when I see bankers getting £1 million bonuses. I wonder what they contributed to the banking industry more than I did to merit a £1 million bonus. It doesn’t make much sense to me, but that’s the way of the world,” said Mr Goodfellow, who received an OBE in 2006 from for services to banking as “patentor of the personal identification number”.

Mr Goodfellow came up with a groundbreaking invention that spawned several industries and generated billions of pounds while working as a development engineer for Glasgow firm Kelvin Hughes, part of Smiths Industries, in the mid-1960s when he was charged with devising a way to enable customers to withdraw cash from banks when Saturday opening ended.

“Most people working during the week couldn’t get to the bank. They wanted a solution. The solution was a machine which would issue cash on demand to a recognised customer,” he recalls. “I set out to develop a cash-issuing machine, and to make this a reality I invented the pin and an associated coded token.”

This token took the form of a plastic card with holes punched in it. The patent documents proposed a system incorporating a card reader and buttons mounted in an external wall of the bank, and stated: “When the customer wishes to withdraw a pack of banknotes from the system he simply inserts his punched card in the card reader of the system, and operates the set of 10 push-buttons in accordance with his personal identification number.”

Aside from the cards with punched holes, the system remains the same for today’s ATMs.

After Goodfellow successfully demonstrated the methodology by producing a model, the go-ahead was given for prototypes to be built, and the first Chubb-branded machines were installed at branches of Westminster Bank (later to become NatWest) in 1967.

While Mr Zuckerberg of Facebook fame has secured a place on the Forbes list of billionaires and a multimillion-dollar portfolio of property and land in California, New York and Hawaii, Mr Goodfellow has had to settle for a three-bedroom house in Paisley.