Zahlen, bitte! 43 patents and a signet ring: the development of the smart card

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Fifty years ago, the Egyptian-French inventor, engineer, humorist and author Roland Moreno applied for a patent for a method that described the use of a PIN-protected EPROM for identification by a reader. His "Procedé et dispositif de commande électronique" can be translated as a "system for transmitting data using an independent portable object and an autonomous registration device" (DE251290A1). The Moreno patent is regarded as the birth of the smart card: the breakthrough came with France Telekom's decision in 1983 to install public card telephones. 250,000 phone cards were sold out in no time.

Young, enterprising engineer

Roland Moreno was just 29 years old when his patent was filed by his company Innovatron on March 25, 1974. He had already made a name for himself with some bizarre inventions such as a singing mechanical bird or the electric pocket piano called Pianok and had cemented his reputation as a crazy inventor (Professeur Nimbus).

In the 1970 film "The Things of Life" by Claude Sautet, the mechanical bird plays a nice supporting role. By this time, Moreno had also written and successfully sold software that compiled names from dictionaries to generate new names for companies or products.

Zahlen, bitte!

In this section, we present amazing, impressive, informative and funny figures ("Zahlen") from the fields of IT, science, art, business, politics and, of course, mathematics every Tuesday. The wordplay "Zahlen, bitte!" for a section about numbers is based on the ambiguity of the German word "Zahlen." On one hand, "Zahlen" can be understood as a noun in the sense of digits and numerical values, which fits the theme of the section. On the other hand, the phrase "Zahlen, bitte!" is reminiscent of a waiter's request in a restaurant or bar when they are asked to bring the bill. Through this association, the section acquires a playful and slightly humorous undertone that catches the readers' attention and makes them curious about the presented numbers and facts.

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In 1971, Intel introduced the 1702, a programmable ROM chip called EPROM (Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory) that could be erased and rewritten with data. Moreno worked intensively on the possibilities of this new technology: his first idea was a kind of electronic signet ring, modeled on the way the nobility had signed documents with a wax seal centuries before.

From the impractical signet ring to the smart card

The chip was soldered onto a ring and the legs were pressed into a socket to "seal" it. This system, called Ring à Puce (Flohring) by Moreno, was rather impractical, although the first demonstration of his method in 1976 was successful. So he came up with the idea of attaching the chip to a card that was inserted into a reader. He named the process TMR after Woody Allen's movie "Take the Money and Run".

Moreno secured the entire process with the communication between card and reader with 43 further patents, the most important of which was "Système pour transférer et mémoriser des données de manière personnelle et confidentielle au moyen d'objets portatifs électroniques indépendants" dated May 13, 1975. The "Order for the storage and transmission of confidential data" (DE26212691A) describes how data is encrypted and can only be read and transmitted by entering a PIN.

First ATM with card access

In collaboration with the company Meccano, he developed a reader for his "Carte à Puce" and ultimately the forerunner of an ATM. The breakthrough for his chip card came at the beginning of the 1980s, when the problem of small change was tackled in France. At the beginning of 1983, France Telecom rolled out card telephones throughout the country and issued 250,000 Télécartes in an initial run, which were sold out in no time.

This was followed by parking machines that could be fed with a cash card. In 1992, the French banks followed suit and issued a smart card version of their Carte Bleu, which had been in circulation since the 1970s. They were also very successful because the otherwise necessary PIN entry at highway toll booths was no longer necessary.

Roland Moreno earned around 150 million euros from the patents and his company Innovatron until his death in 2012 and was able to devote himself to his playful inventions again. Not bad for a son of Jewish immigrants from Egypt, who in his last years passionately defended French culture and even published a cookbook under the pseudonym Laure Dynateur (l'ordinateur = computer).

Some of his works of art and games, such as the Bachotron or the Matapof box for playing heads or tails, are on display at the Center Pompidou. However, there is no trace of his Internet project Radio Deliro.

Franco-German achievement

Together with Jürgen Dethloff, Roland Moreno was awarded the Eduard Rhein Foundation's Technology Prize as the highest scientific award. They both received the prize for the development of smart card technology. Research into smart cards was also carried out in Germany. Together with his partner Helmut Gröttrup, Dethloff had already submitted a patent for an imitation-proof identification switch on February 6, 1967.

While Moreno went from a signet ring with a chip to a smart card, Dethloff and Gröttrup started with a kind of key, as the drawing at the end of the patent specification shows. In their research at Giesecke+Devrient, they finally ended up using EEPROMs on a card, but were already outlining the use of wireless technologies for communication between the card reader and the card.

(dahe)