On September 2, 1969, America’s first automatic teller
machine (ATM) makes its public debut, dispensing
cash to customers at Chemical Bank in Rockville
Centre, New York. ATMs went on to revolutionize the
banking industry, eliminating the need to visit a bank
to conduct basic financial transactions.  

By the 1980s, these money machines had become
widely popular and handled many of the functions
previously performed by human tellers, such as
check deposits and  money transfers between
accounts. 

Today, ATMs are as indispensable to most people
as cell phones and e-mail.

Donald C. Wetzel (93) is an American businessman known
for holding the USA patent to the automatic teller machine.

CAMILLE BOHANNON

Robert Plant is best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the
English rock band Led Zeppelin for all of its existence from 1968
until 1980, when the band broke up following the death of John
Bonham, the band’s drummer. He was inducted with the band
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.

In 2008, Rolling Stone editors ranked him number 15 on their
list of the 100 best singers of all time. In 2011, Rolling Stone
readers ranked Plant the greatest of all lead singers. In 2006,
Hit Parader magazine named Plant the "Greatest Metal Vocalist
of All Time".           

In 2009, Plant was voted "the greatest voice in rock" in a poll
conducted by Planet Rock. Plant is 74 years old today.

CAMILLE BOHANNON

On March 7, 1876, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell received a
patent for his revolutionary new invention: the telephone.

The Scottish-born Bell worked in London with his father, Melville
Bell, who developed Visible Speech, a written system used to
teach speaking to the deaf. In the 1870s, the Bells moved to
Boston, Massachusetts, where the younger Bell found work as
a teacher at the Pemberton Avenue School for the Deaf. He later
married one of his students, Mabel Hubbard.

While in Boston, Bell became very interested in the possibility of transmitting speech over wires. Samuel F.B. Morse’s invention
of the telegraph in 1843 had made nearly instantaneous
communication possible between two distant points.

With the help of Thomas A. Watson, a Boston machine shop
employee, Bell developed a prototype.

George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985)

“The War of the Worlds”, Orson Welles’s realistic radio drama
of a Martian invasion of Earth, was originally broadcast live on
the CBS network, Sunday evening, October 30, 1938.

Welles was only 23 years old when his Mercury Theater company
decided to update H.G. Wells’ 19th-century science fiction novel
The War of the Worlds for national radio. Despite his age, Welles
had been in radio for several years, most notably as the voice of
“The Shadow” in the hit mystery program of the same name. “War
of the Worlds” was not planned as a radio hoax, and Welles had
little idea of how legendary it would eventually become.

Orson Welles as he was interviewed after the “War of the Worlds” broadcast in 1938. (Daily News)