Historical Trivia: Travel and Money Before the ATM

[Ad Orientem]

So what did one do for money in the pre-ATM era if you had to leave town on business or pleasure? For obvious reasons most banks declined to cash simple cheques drawn against accounts from a non-local institution not well known to them. But people had to travel even before the era of trains, steamships and telegraphs. And carrying large amounts of cash was hazardous. Over the last century or so traveler's cheques became available to persons of the middling sort and these would become fairly common by the post war era. But for the well off going back centuries, the preferred method of staying in money while abroad was something called a circular letter of credit. See here for a discussion of the old fashioned way of paying your bills on the road.

http://library.law.columbia.edu/CircularLetterOfCredit/