How the jumbo jet forced the invention of the modern credit card system
The credit card technology we use today was born from a mid-1960s airport crisis. As jumbo jets increased passenger volume, manual bank verification processes caused massive delays. This video explores how airlines turned to IBM for a faster solution, involving French fraudsters and a hippie inventor.
In the mid-1960s, the introduction of the 747 jumbo jet created a bottleneck at airports. Because passengers typically paid for tickets at the terminal using credit cards, the manual process of calling banks to authorize each transaction caused long, unsustainable queues.
To solve this, airlines approached IBM to streamline the payment process. This initiative eventually led to the development of the magnetic stripe and chip technology now standard on credit cards, fundamentally changing how we handle transactions.
