News

PIN patent gets owner $15

April 25, 2012

Since it was thought up nearly 50 years ago, nobody's come up with a more durable or widely accepted authenticator for banking than the PIN. So you might expect the person who invented it to be a millionaire several times over by now.

But according to a report in The Sun, James Goodfellow was paid just $15 for the patent to his invention, which is now used at roughly two million ATMs around the world, and in a million transactions every hour.

In 1965, the technology company Goodfellow worked for asked him to develop a secure method to enable cash withdrawals from machines (some of the earliest ATMs) at Midland Bank (now part of HSBC), said The Sun.

Goodfellow came up with the idea of a four-digit number punched into a plastic card as a binary code unique to the customer. When he was laid off a year later, he signed over the patent license to his employer and was given $1 for each of the 15 countries where his invention was in use.

Goodfellow said it didn't bother him that he never cashed in on his PIN concept. “I’m quite happy just knowing that it was me that invented it," he told The Sun.

The PIN inventor is now on a shortlist with the likes of Simon Cowell and James Dyson for the Patent Office’s British Visionary Inventor award. The Sun article said the winner will be announced tomorrow, on World Intellectual Property Day.

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