Credit Card History

The notion of the credit card was first introduced to the world by novelist Edward Bellamy in 1887. In his novel, Looking Backward, he mentions this concept where each person had a credit card that was used to make purchases.

It was however, first used as a way of selling gas to an ever-increasing number of vehicle owners in the United States of America in the 1920’s. These cards were initially known as charge cards and in time various companies allowed the use of different cards. In the early days it was quite easy to falsify a credit card, as a number of these cards were printed onto a type of card, and not plastic like they are today.

During the 1930’s and 1940’s another form of the credit card occurred. It was known as the Charga-Plate and was made of a fairly small piece of metal, which had the owner’s name, city of residence, and the state in which that person lived imprinted into it. It also contained a small piece of card for a signature. Only the large retailers made use of these, and they were only issued to their everyday clients. Most often, the Charga-Plates were kept at the store.

In 1950 Ralph Schneider and Frank X. McNamara founded Diners Club. This allowed people to use one card instead of many. The difference between modern credit cards and the Diners Club card is that the Diners Club card had to be paid in full each and every month. No credit as such existed then.

The next card to come along was Carte Blanche and then American Express in 1958. American Express led to the creation of a global credit card system. The Visa system also came into existence in 1958 via Bank of America’s BankAmericard. MasterCard came into the world in 1966 when it was first known as MasterCharge.

Due to the specific banking system in the United States of America, credit card usage began to soar, as travellers around the country were able to take their credit with them as they went, as they could not make immediate use of their own banks.

From there, the U.K. has their first credit card released in 1966. Many other countries did not take to the credit card system due to various reasons such as bank reliability, or in some instances people preferred using cash.

In more recent years there has been the development of using microchips in built into the credit cards in order to limit credit card fraud. There has also been the establishment of Affinity cards where cards are linked to certain features and a specific group or company benefits be means of it.

Generally, the more money you earn, combined with the amount of spending done on a credit card allows for a higher credit limit.