A French 1983 smart telephone card — picture by Gus Leonisky

Smartcard Inventor Dies
Frenchman Roland Moreno, inventor of the smartcard, died in Paris on 29 April at the age of 66

Electronics fanatic, Moreno as a student designed a machine to toss a coin. He made a living with small jobs for around ten years before creating his own company in 1972, Innovatron, in order ”to sell his ideas.”

He first managed to sell a machine that creates new words from existing words, the Radoteur (driveller) that is still commercially used to create new company names by the NOMEN society.

The major invention of Roland Moreno is the Smartcard, patented in 1974.This invention has been used widely in phone cards, bank cards, Sim cards and most recently, France's Navigo contactless public transport card. 

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May be the NSW transport system could investigate the contactless public transport card?