Intermediate 
Sometimes life isnt 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 didnt 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. What have they contributed to the banking industry, compared to me, to merit a 1m bonus, Goodfellow says. He invented something that generated billions of pounds and he got nothing.
There have been arguments for years over who is the inventor of the ATM and, in 2005, a man called John Shepherd-Barron received a UK honour as the inventor of the automatic cash dispenser. But, the UK government is now saying it was Goodfellow who invented the ATM  so it seems that, after all the arguments, he now has his place in history.
Back in the mid-1960s, Goodfellow was working as a development engineer and was asked to devise a way to allow customers to withdraw cash from banks on Saturdays. Most people worked during the week and couldnt get to the bank. They wanted a solution. The solution was a machine which would give cash to a recognized customer, he remembers. I wanted to develop a cash-issuing machine and, to make this a reality, I invented the PIN [personal identi cation number] and a coded token.
This token was a plastic card with holes in it. The patent documents described a system with a card reader and buttons mounted in an external wall of the bank. After Goodfellow produced a model that showed how the machine would work, prototypes were built and the  rst machines were installed in 1967. At around the same time, Shepherd-Barron was developing a rival machine. His machine didnt use plastic cards  instead, it used cheques containing carbon-14, a mildly radioactive substance. The machine detected the carbon-14, matched the cheque against a PIN and paid out the cash.
It is widely accepted that the Shepherd-Barron ATM was the worlds  rst to be installed and used by the public; the  rst one, at a bank in north London, was opened on 27 June, 1967  a month before Goodfellows ATM appeared. However, the patent for Goodfellows machine was lodged on 2 May, 1966, 14 months before Shepherd-Barrons ATM machine was first used.
Shepherd-Barron received an of cial honour for his achievement and Goodfellow says: My one big regret is that I never said anything about it until John Shepherd-Barron received the OBE in 2005 for inventing the automatic cash dispenser. That really stuck in my throat and I kicked up a fuss.
Shepherd-Barron is no longer alive but, in a 2005 interview, he was quite critical of his rival: I dont know him but its clear that the difference between Goodfellow and us was that we thought through the whole system concept and that was important to the banks who bought it. His invention reminds me of the hovercraft, an elegant failure."
The cash machine is now used all over the world and nothing  the contactless revolution, bitcoin, wearable technology, etc  is slowing its growth: there are now 3m ATMs worldwide and, by 2020, there will probably be 4m.
The good news for Goodfellow is that he is beginning to be recognized for his invention. The website ATMInventor.com says: Who invented the idea of an ATM? We believe it was Luther George Simjian. Who invented the ATM as we know it? We have to think it was James Goodfellow for holding a patent date of 1966. Who invented the ATM design we recognize today? We think it was John D White in the US.
Even better for Goodfellow, his achievement has been of cially recognized in the latest edition of a 180-page guidebook called Life in the United Kingdom. In the section about great British inventions of the twentieth century, it states: In the 1960s, James Goodfellow (1937-) invented the cash-dispensing automatic teller machine (ATM) or cashpoint.
So after all these years, Goodfellow is  nally among a group of famous British inventors with John Logie Baird (the television), Alan Turing (the Turing machine), Sir Frank Whittle (the jet engine) and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the World Wide Web). Asked what he did with the 10 he received in the 1960s, Goodfellow says he thinks he blew it on a night out. He added: It didnt change my life.