<P> In 1934, American Airlines and the Air Transport Association simplified the process even more with the advent of the Air Travel Card . They created a numbering scheme that identified the issuer of the card as well as the customer account . This is the reason the modern UATP cards still start with the number 1 . With an Air Travel Card, passengers could "buy now, and pay later" for a ticket against their credit and receive a fifteen percent discount at any of the accepting airlines . By the 1940s, all of the major US airlines offered Air Travel Cards that could be used on 17 different airlines . By 1941 about half of the airlines' revenues came through the Air Travel Card agreement . The airlines had also started offering installment plans to lure new travelers into the air . In October 1948, the Air Travel Card became the first internationally valid charge card within all members of the International Air Transport Association . </P> <P> The concept of customers paying different merchants using the same card was expanded in 1950 by Ralph Schneider and Frank McNamara, founders of Diners Club, to consolidate multiple cards . The Diners Club, which was created partially through a merger with Dine and Sign, produced the first "general purpose" charge card and required the entire bill to be paid with each statement . That was followed by Carte Blanche and in 1958 by American Express which created a worldwide credit card network (although these were initially charge cards that later acquired credit card features). </P> <P> Until 1958, no one had been able to successfully establish a revolving credit financial system in which a card issued by a third - party bank was being generally accepted by a large number of merchants, as opposed to merchant - issued revolving cards accepted by only a few merchants . There had been a dozen attempts by small American banks, but none of them were able to last very long . In September 1958, Bank of America launched the BankAmericard in Fresno, California, which would become the first successful recognizably modern credit card . This card succeeded where others failed by breaking the chicken - and - egg cycle in which consumers did not want to use a card that few merchants would accept and merchants did not want to accept a card that few consumers used . Bank of America chose Fresno because 45% of its residents used the bank, and by sending a card to 60,000 Fresno residents at once, the bank was able to convince merchants to accept the card . It was eventually licensed to other banks around the United States and then around the world, and in 1976, all BankAmericard licensees united themselves under the common brand Visa . In 1966, the ancestor of MasterCard was born when a group of banks established Master Charge to compete with BankAmericard; it received a significant boost when Citibank merged its own Everything Card, launched in 1967, into Master Charge in 1969 . </P> <P> Early credit cards in the U.S., of which BankAmericard was the most prominent example, were mass - produced and mass mailed unsolicited to bank customers who were thought to be good credit risks . They have been mailed off to unemployables, drunks, narcotics addicts and to compulsive debtors, a process President Johnson's Special Assistant Betty Furness found very like "giving sugar to diabetics". These mass mailings were known as "drops" in banking terminology, and were outlawed in 1970 due to the financial chaos they caused . However, by the time the law came into effect, approximately 100 million credit cards had been dropped into the U.S. population . After 1970, only credit card applications could be sent unsolicited in mass mailings . </P>

When were credit cards introduced in the us