[cynwoody]

>It's quite interesting to hear how the genius idea of a bar code was conceived by dragging four fingers in the sand.

In 1920, fourteen-year-old Philo Farnsworth was tilling his family's Idaho potato field. He'd been thinking of how to transmit motion pictures electronically. Observing the neat parallel lines of the potato field, it occurred to him that a frame to be transmitted could be broken down into parallel lines, transmitted, and reproduced at the remote end, line by line, in synchrony.

http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_05_27_a_televisionary.htm