The barcode was drawn in beach sand

In 1948, a grocery executive asked Drexel University for a way to speed up checkout lines. A student, Bernard Silver, overheard him and told his friend Joseph Woodland, who became obsessed with the problem. Months later, sitting on a Miami beach, Woodland was drawing Morse code dots and dashes in the sand when he dragged his fingers downward. The dashes stretched into lines. There it was: a widened Morse code a machine could read.

They patented the idea in 1952, but the technology did not exist yet: it needed lasers and cheap computers. The patent expired before earning a dollar.

On 26 June 1974, in a supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a scanner read the first barcode in history on a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum. That pack ended up in the Smithsonian. The sand, of course, went out with the tide.