The barcode was first sketched as lines in Florida beach sand

In 1948, graduate student Bernard Silver overheard a food-chain executive begging for a way to read product information automatically at checkout. He told his friend Norman Joseph Woodland, and the pair began tinkering.

The breakthrough came on Miami Beach. Woodland, a former Boy Scout, was thinking in Morse code when he raked his fingers through the sand. “Now I have four lines,” he recalled, “and they could be wide lines and narrow lines” — dots and dashes stretched downward into a machine-readable pattern. His first design wrapped those lines into a circular bullseye meant to scan from any angle.

They filed a patent in 1949, granted in 1952 — then sold the rights for a modest sum, reportedly around $15,000. Neither man grew rich from the idea that would reshape retail.

The bullseye had a fatal flaw: printing presses smeared ink along the direction of travel, blurring the concentric rings and confusing scanners. The fix came from George Laurer at IBM, who in the early 1970s laid the code out as straight vertical bars — the rectangular UPC — which smeared harmlessly along the bars’ length and stayed readable.

On June 26, 1974, a pack of Wrigley’s gum in Troy, Ohio became the first product ever scanned at a checkout.

The missing piece had never really been the code; it was the laser scanner, cheap and reliable, which only arrived two decades after the sand drawing. That historic gum pack now sits in the Smithsonian.