50 Things That Made The Modern Economy With Tim Harford

There are two ways to tell this story.

One of them describes that classic flash have been ventive insight.

In 1948, Joseph Woodland, a graduate student in Philadelphia, was pondering a challenge

that had been thrown down by a local Philly retailer.

Was there any way to speed up the process of checking out in his stores by automating

the tedious process of recording the transaction?

Woodland was a smart young man.

He'd worked on the atomic bomb during the war.

At the other end of the spectrum, he'd also designed an improved system for playing elevator

music.

But now he was stumped.

One of his parents, in Miami Beach, sat and pondered and idly combed his fingers in a circle,

letting the sand slide between his fingertips.

But then, as he looked down at the ridges and furrows, the thought struck him.

Just like Moore's code used dots and dashes to convey a message, he could use thin lines

and thick lines to encode information.

The Zebra Striped Bulls Eye could describe a product and its price in a code that a

machine might be able to read.

The idea was workable, though with the technology of the time it was costly.

But as computers advanced and lasers were invented, it became more realistic.

The Striped Scan system was independently rediscovered and refined several times over the years.

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