Who can imagine life today without an Automated Teller Machine（ATM）? They are available in considerable numbers throughout the world.
The first ATM was the brainchild of an enterprising Turkish-American inventor Luther George Simjian. When the idea of an automated banking machine struck him, he registered 20 patents before any bank agreed to give it a trial run. It is easy to assume that the inventor of such a popular machine was laughing all the way to the bank. Within six months of its operation in New York in 1939, the device was removed due to lack of customer acceptance.
It was not until 1967, nearly 30 years later, that Barclays Bank, in a careful launch, rolled out a self-service machine in London, England, which proved successful. The first cash machine relied on customers' use of prepaid tokens（代币）to get envelopes with a fixed amount of cash inside.
The banks' principle was seemingly customer service. But it would be foolish to minimize the many advantages that cash machines provided to the banks themselves. By the late 1970s, the highest fixed cost for the average large bank was its branches. The greatest variable cost and loss to profits were its staff. Ban k accounts swiftly recognized that self-service operations could reduce bank branch staff cost by70 percent.
Experts quickly determined that public acceptance of ATMs counted on convenience, simplicity, speed, security and trust. For maximum efficiency, ATMs had to be located near public transport or in a shopping mall, not at a branch. The busier and more crowded the location, obviously, the better. Now, roughly 75percent of all cash provided by banks to their customers comes from cash machines..
Public acceptance of deposits（存款）by machine was significantly slower than customers' usage of ATMs for withdrawals. In general, it seems that customers sometimes still prefer and trust an over-the-counter transaction（交易）for deposits.
A．Location, in particular, was a key factor.
B．His cash machine, however, didn't prove durable.
C．The device was relatively primitive, at least by today's standards.
D．However, cash machines posed some interesting, unanswered questions.
E．An interesting factor was the issue of bio-statistics for customer identification.
F．Devices originally dismissed by the public are now recognized as essential institutions.
G．Soon afterwards, many other banks became admittedly champions of the cash machine.
