Ever Forget to Put Your Credit Card Back in Your Wallet?
September 10, 2009 Post a Comment Friday, September 11th, 2009, Netcast 915. Back to Dick's Gadget Warehouse.
This gizmo goes back to 1991. Here was a new device called the SecuraCard Wallet. Koltov, a company that still makes ladies pocketbooks and travel bags, manufactured it. Other Koltov products are easy to find on the web today, but there’s no sign of the SecuraCard Wallet anymore. Here’s how the SecuraCard wallet worked. Each pocket of the wallet that held a credit card had a document retainer. When you removed a credit card, the contacts would touch and set off an audible alarm. Now that would drive you crazy, so there was yet another device installed in this wallet, a light sensor. With the wallet open, the alarm would not sound. This assumed – correctly – that your wallet would be open when you took out your credit card. And that you would leave it open waiting for the credit card to be returned from the waiter, or merchant. Once you returned the credit card to a pocket, the contacts would be pushed apart again. But if you closed the wallet with a credit card missing, once the light sensor was covered, the alarm would sound. Each pocket of the SecuraWallet had a dummy credit card in it in case you didn’t have enough credit cards to fill every slot. The version I have is a red leather ladies model. It’s from a press event, and I can’t recall if there was a man’s wallet version. It was expensive. About $40 and that was in 1991 dollars.
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The Giz Wiz
Dane Golden, President of TWiT, and all around nice guy, found another mention of SecuraCard. It was featured in Popular Science back in 1986. It looked more like a man's wallet in the photo and sold for $31.50. That must have been before Koltov licensed the technolgy for a more deluxe model.
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