It is becoming almost obsolete with the evolution of cashless payments, for which even a smartphone is now enough, but in reality it is just 54 today. We are talking about the automatic teller machine for cash withdrawals, also called ATM or (in Italy, incorrectly) Bancomat: the first ever in the world was in fact opened on 27 June 1967 and Enfield Town, a county town in Middlesex, at the extreme north of the London metropolitan area, by a branch of the British bank Barclays. The town is little known abroad but is actually a city of over 150.000 inhabitants, famous not only for being the pioneer of the ATM but also for its greenhouses and because the great English poet John Keats, an exponent of Romanticism, studied there.
No less romantic was the story of the first ATM in the world, given that it was inaugurated that day in 1967 by the famous comedian Reg Varney, who at the time starred in popular sitcoms such as The Rag Trade and On The Buses. Instead, it was the engineer John Shepherd-Barron who invented it. The record held by Enfield and Barclays lasted for two years, given that only in 1969 the automatic withdrawal of cash began to be possible also in the USA and Australia. But why did Barclays choose a peripheral city and not the big capital London, to unveil such a revolutionary innovation (at least for those times)? Meanwhile, because Enfield was (and is) a very rich district, strongly linked to industry: Royal Small Arms produced the Lee Enfield rifle there and above all it was the nerve center of the electronics industry (lighting, but also TV and radio), as well as a thriving brewer.
In short, there has always been a lot of business and money, and choosing a somewhat secluded city could also be a way to test the novelty, before clearing it on a very large scale in London and the rest of the country. In fact for this reason the following five prototypes, again in 1967, were launched again in satellite cities such as Hove, Ipswich, Luton, Peterborough and Southend. Only after in London, where, however, there was an immediate boom: in 1969, while the ATM made its debut in the USA, there were already 34 branches within a radius of 15 miles from Marble Arch. Today there are over 3 million ATMs worldwide, still widely used despite e-commerce and digital payments. A commemorative plaque was installed in Enfield in 2010 which reads as follows: “The world's first cash machine was installed here on 27 June 1967. Lives made much easier”.
