Some people can’t rest until they fix things…

No-one likes standing in line – and Edgar Biss was no exception. Minutes ticked by as he waited to see the bank clerk. A dozen people ahead of him shifted their weight from one foot to another, shuffled their papers and glanced resentfully at the clock. Every now and again, someone would sigh.

This was in the time before mobile phones – and only one person in the line had a newspaper for distraction.

Edgar’s eyes settled on the clerk. His finger flicked steadily through piles of notes while he counted under his breath. When he lost count, he would start over from the top of the pile. “There’s a better way of doing this,” thought Edgar. And right there, he started to imagine the technology that would become Tellermate.

A vision of the future

Edgar was an engineer whose inventions up until that point had been all about manufacturing steel. He’d developed load cell weighing technologies that allowed the ingredients of steel to be measured with great accuracy. “I wonder,” he thought, as the line inched along, “If the same weighing techniques could be applied to bank notes? Because if you weighed the bank notes, there’d be no waiting around and no errors.”

In 1979, Edgar Biss invented the first Tellermate machine. It counted banknotes and could be calibrated to take account of humidity and transferred materials (because, for example, a fishmonger’s bank notes will weigh more than a department store’s, because the environment is damp.) It eliminated error and vastly reduced the opportunity for fraud. It reduced the amount of time people spent counting. It was, quite simply, a revolution in cash management.