The Stripes on Everything You Buy

The story

Go to your kitchen and pick up almost anything — a biscuit box, a milk carton, a tube of toothpaste. Turn it over. There they are: little black and white stripes. They are on most packaged things in shops all over the world. Have you ever wondered where stripes like that come from?

From a beach.

Truly. Many years ago, an inventor named Joseph Woodland was sitting on a beach in Florida, thinking about a problem a shopkeeper had begged someone to solve: checkout lines were slow. Every price had to be typed in by hand, for every single item, for every single customer. Shops dreamed of a code a machine could read in a blink.

Woodland and his friend Bernard Silver had taken on the puzzle together, and Woodland knew Morse code — the old signal alphabet of dots and dashes. As he thought, he idly poked his fingers into the sand... and then dragged them down the beach, leaving long thin lines. He looked at the trails his fingers had made. And there it was. Dots and dashes... stretched into STRIPES. Thin stripe, thick stripe, narrow gap, wide gap — a machine could shine a light across them and read the pattern, quick as a wink.

It took years — and many more clever minds — to make it work; machines had to get better first. But one summer morning in 1974, in a supermarket in a small American town, a cashier scanned the very first product ever sold with the new stripes at a checkout. Beep. Do you know what it was? A packet of chewing gum. That little beep worked so well that today, all over the world, the beeps have never stopped.

So what do the stripes actually say? They spell out a number — and every kind of product gets its own. This biscuit box: one number. That milk: another. When the scanner beeps, the shop's computer looks up the number and finds the price, all in less than a blink. That is why checkout is fast, why the receipt knows what you bought, and why the shop knows it is time to order more biscuits.

And listen for the so-what, because it is bigger than shopping. Barcodes let hospitals match the right medicine to the right person. They help parcels find your house from across the world. One beach-sand idea quietly runs beneath the whole busy world.

So next time you are at the shops and you hear beep, beep, beep — smile. Every beep remembers an inventor's fingers, dragged through the sand, still talking to the machines. Ideas can come from anywhere. Even from doodling at the beach.