Jürgen Dethloff had what it takes to be an entrepreneur early on: at the age of 26, one year after passing the exam to become a master radio mechanic in 1949, he started his own company. Dethloff Elektronik specialized in manufacturing voice and command systems for ships. 15 years later, he founded Jürgen Dethloff Hamburg.
But Jürgen Dethloff was an inventor who thought ahead: even back in the 1960s, he found paper documents like the identity card outdated. He believed there should be a forgery-proof, machine-readable document. With his business partner Helmut Gröttrup, an expert in rocket control, he developed a plastic card with an integrated circuit. The two men registered the idea with the German Patent and Trademark Office in 1969 under the title “identification switch”. The 45-square- centimeter card later became known as a “chip card” as it contains one or several semiconductor chips.
Smart and small: the smart card
In 1977, Dethloff applied for a patent for the freely programmable microprocessor card as an enhancement of his invention. The French postal service officially introduced the first chip card – a telephone card – in 1984. These days, the chip cards in our wallets have many other functions, for example as credit cards or patient data cards. Dethloff’s original idea, the machine- readable identity card, was only introduced in Germany in 1987.
(Image: Valerie Potapova – Adobe Stock)
