1925 – 2019

Who was Tom Paterson?

A planner, an originator of process, and the inventor named on a 1966 British patent application for a machine that dispenses cash against a card and a private number.

Thomas Glynn Paterson was born on 12 March 1925 in Kearny, New Jersey, and died on 3 September 2019 in Fort Collins, Colorado, aged 94. He worked as a corporate planner and then as an independent consultant, and he is the Paterson in Paterson StratOp® and Paterson LifePlan®.

He described himself as a planner and an originator of process. A British patent application from April 1966 shows what that meant in practice.

The patents

Before he built planning processes, Paterson put his name to a design you would recognise at once. On 20 April 1966, RCA filed a UK patent application naming him as inventor: GB 1,183,336, “Dispensing Apparatus”. It describes a card reader, a keypad for a private identification number, a central memory holding the corresponding number, and a comparison between the two. Cash is dispensed only on a match. Patent offices classify it under G07F19/20, automatic teller machines. Corresponding applications followed in Sweden and Germany in April 1967.

RCA filed that application twelve days before the 2 May 1966 priority date of GB 1,197,183, the patent generally credited with introducing the PIN, for which James Goodfellow holds an OBE. That does not make Paterson the inventor of the PIN, or the first. Priority dates record when an application was filed, not when an idea was had. The two systems differ: Goodfellow's checks the number against encrypted information on the card, RCA's against a central memory. And Goodfellow's was built, deployed as the Chubb MD2 and licensed by NCR and IBM, while we have found no evidence that RCA built theirs. We state the dates and leave you to weigh them.

On 11 April 1967 a US application followed from RCA's site at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. US Patent 3,588,449, “Electronic check-cashing system”, was granted on 28 June 1971 with Paterson as sole inventor. It describes an erase key, an alarm after repeated failed attempts, and machines sited in supermarkets and airports, linked to the bank by telephone line. It has been cited as prior art in filings by Docutel, Diebold, IBM and Omron, and in patents issued as recently as 2021.

Paterson did not invent the cash machine, and we do not claim that he did. What the record shows is a set of early patent documents, in four countries, with his name on them.

The career

Most of what is known about Paterson's career comes from his own account, in two recorded interviews: an appearance on the Better Life Television programme Journeys 'n Journals around 2008–09, and a Veterans History Project interview recorded at his home on 26 January 2016 by Brad Hoopes, who has donated Colorado veterans' interviews to the Library of Congress for two decades. This section is what he said.

He enlisted in the US Marine Corps at 17, after Pearl Harbor. The Marines sent him to Cornell to study engineering, then to Camp Pendleton, where he made maps from reconnaissance photographs for bomber crews, work connected with Iwo Jima. After a medical discharge he went to Boston University on the GI Bill, graduating with honours in business management.

His corporate career ran from W. T. Grant to Douglas Aircraft, where he was associated with planning for the DC-8, then to Northrop as head of planning in its new electronics division, then IBM, then RCA. The US patent places him at RCA's Valley Forge site in 1967, the home of its space-systems operations, consistent with his account of work connected with the Apollo programme. He said he proposed RCA's involvement in Walt Disney World, with backing from Roy Disney, in work connected with Space Mountain.

He later became an independent consultant and said he worked in approximately 100 countries, with repeated engagements in Japan. He also described a friendship with Peter Drucker and his wife Doris.

Across both interviews he describes himself in the same terms: as a planner, and an originator of process. Not as an engineer, and not as an inventor.

In practice

Among the clients Paterson named were Eastman Kodak, General Motors, Printronix and JLG Industries, which he said grew from $90 million to around $3 billion.

The strongest modern evidence comes from a client rather than from us. Curt Richardson, the founder of OtterBox, has publicly described, in his own words, using the StratOp process at a company he owns. He characterises it as an iterative cycle: gaining perspective, setting priorities, assigning task forces and reassessing.

The books

Living the Life You Were Meant to Live was published by Thomas Nelson in 1998, with a 2003 paperback carrying a foreword by Rick Warren. Deeper, Richer, Fuller: Discover the Spiritual Life You Long For was published by Howard Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in 2010.

A note on sources

Some claims about Tom Paterson that are widely repeated online do not stand up to checking, and we do not repeat them here. Every significant fact on this page is sourced below, and where we rely on his own account we say so. We would like anyone who checks to trust this page more afterwards, not less.