14 October 2013
When David Cameron boasted about British inventions, refuting Vladimir Putin’s accusation that we are just “a small island”, he might have had Sir Anthony Cleaver, inventor of the ATM in mind. Cleaver was at the launch of Who? The Most Remarkable People You’ve Never Heard Of, by Donough O’Brien, at Brompton Oratory.
“In 1969 Tony Cleaver was an engineer at IBM in Chiswick when he was asked to help Lloyds Bank, most of whose customers were paid weekly,” said O’Brien. “It was chaos on Friday afternoons. Tony worked out how to make an automatic teller machine.
“Citibank boasts about having 26,000, and claims to ‘have pioneered with our first ATM machine in 1977’. Not quite, Lloyds beat them to it.”
