John Shepherd-Barron

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John Adrian Shepherd-Barron (born 1925 Tain, Ross, Scotland) is a Scottish inventor.

Educated at the University of Edinburgh, Shepherd-Barron went on to work for De La Rue Instruments in the 1960s and came up with the concept of a self-service machine which would dispense paper currency with 24/7 availability. This was the Automated Teller Machine (ATM). The first machine was established outside a north London branch of Barclays Bank in 1967, when he was Managing Director of De La Rue Instruments: there are now more than a million installed world-wide. He received the OBE in the 2005 New Year's Honours list for services to banking as "inventor of the automatic cash dispenser".

There is still some controversy over the invention: the first ATM ever was not his creation. It was built in 1939, but did not function the same way as an ATM we would think of today works (because of the obvious lack of technology). It was taken out of the bank it was created by (City bank of NYC) the same year it was installed due to the fact that it did not work most of the time. Shepherd-Barron's new version of this, which was created in the late 60's, is what was built upon and evolved until it reached the state that it is currently at.

His son, Nicholas Shepherd-Barron FRS, is professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge.