﻿Sometimes life just isn’t fair. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook and is now worth an estimated $48bn. James Goodfellow also invented something used by millions of people around the world every day – the cash machine – but it didn’t make him rich. In fact, he earned just £10 from the patent and has not made a penny more from it since. 
“You can imagine how I feel when I see bankers getting £1m bonuses. I wonder what they contributed to the banking industry more than I did to merit a £1m bonus. It doesn’t make much sense to me but that’s the way of the world,” Goodfellow says. 
It also annoys him that he’s not seen as a good role model for inventors and engineers. He came up with a groundbreaking invention that generated billions of pounds “and I got nothing, so who’s going to want to follow in James Goodfellow’s footsteps and get £10 if they have a fantastic success?” 
There have been arguments for years over who should officially go down in history as “the inventor of the ATM” and, in 2005, a man called John Shepherd-Barron received a UK honour for services to banking as the “inventor of the automatic cash dispenser”. But, the UK government is now saying it was Goodfellow who invented the ATM – so it would seem that, after all the squabbling, his place in history is now assured. 
Back in the mid-1960s, Goodfellow was working as a development engineer and had been asked to devise a way to enable customers to withdraw cash from banks on Saturdays. “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 recognized customer,” he recalls. “I set out to develop a cash-issuing machine and, to make this a reality, I invented the PIN [personal identification number] and an associated coded token.”