Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (57 page)

“I will feel equality has arrived when we can elect to office women who are as incompetent as some of the men who are already there.”

—
Maureen Reagan

“Woman’s virtue is man’s greatest invention.”

—
Cornelia Otis Skinner

“Who ever thought up the word ‘mammogram’? Every time I hear it, I think I’m supposed to put my breast in an envelope and send it to someone.”

—
Jan King

“I’m furious about the women’s liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming women are brighter than men. That’s true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket.”

—
Anita Loos

“The especial genius of women I believe is to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.”

—
Margaret Fuller

Woodrow Wilson’s 2nd wife, Edith, learned to ride a bike down the halls of the White House.

We see them on every item we buy, but we don’t know what they mean or what they’re used for. Here’s the story of the Universal Product Code.

The story of the bar code begins in 1948, when the president of the Food Fair chain of grocery stores went to see the dean of Philadelphia’s Drexel Institute of Technology. Food Fair wanted Drexel to do research into the feasibility of some kind of device that could collect product information automatically at checkout counters. The dean said no—but a graduate student named Bernard Silver overheard the conversation. Silver was intrigued and mentioned it to his friend Joseph Woodland, a teacher at Drexel. The two men decided to work together on creating a device.

After some moderately successful experiments using ultraviolet light, Woodland quit his teaching job and moved to his grandfather’s apartment in Florida to devote more time to the project. One day while lounging on Miami Beach, Woodland was thinking about the problem and absentmindedly pulled his fingers through the sand, leaving lines. That gave him the brainstorm to work with Morse code and to extend the lines, so that dots would become skinny lines and dashes would become fat lines—the prototype of the first bar code.

To read the code, Woodland used technology from another project he was working on—improving Muzak using the technology from movie sound tracks. Sound for movies was printed in a light-and-dark pattern along the edges of film, read by a light, transformed to electric waveforms, then converted to sound. Woodland and Silver adapted the technology to read their morse code lines and filed a patent application on October 20, 1949.

In 1951 Woodland got a job with IBM, where he hoped to push his invention forward. In his spare time, he and Silver built the first actual bar code scanner in the middle of Woodland’s living room. The finished product was the size of a desk, and used a 500-watt lightbulb and a “photomultiplier tube” designed for movie sound systems, hooked up to an oscilloscope. When the bar code on a piece of paper was moved across the beam of light, it caused the oscilloscope signal to move. It was crude, it was huge, and it was so hot that it set the paper on fire…but it worked. Woodland and Silver had created an electronic device that could read a printed code. Their patent was granted in 1952.

In 1962 IBM offered to buy the patent, but Woodland and Silver thought the offer was too low. A few weeks later, Philco made a better offer and they sold it. Philco later sold it to RCA.

A snapping turtle can only swallow when its head is under water.

At the same time, the railroad industry was developing its own barcode system. Tracking freight cars created an impossible tangle of paperwork; bar coding each car looked like a cheaper, easier way to do it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t (and eventually they scrapped the idea)—but by the time that became obvious, technology had progressed significantly and it could be used to address some of the bugs in Silver and Woodland’s system.

By the late 1960s, lasers and microchips made it possible to greatly reduce the size of the code reader. The bars of the code were also revised to record the numbers 0 through 9 instead of Morse code dots and dashes.

In 1969 the General Trading Company of New Jersey started using bar codes to direct shipments to their loading docks. Then the General Motors plant in Michigan began to use them to monitor production of axle units. Meanwhile, RCA was working on a bull’s-eye-shaped code for grocery stores. IBM saw a huge potential market and wanted to get into it, too. Then someone at IBM remembered that the bar code’s inventor, Joseph Woodland, was still working for IBM. Woodland was transferred to the project and became instrumental in developing what we know today as the UPC—the Universal Product Code.

In 1973 the Uniform Grocery Product Code set nationwide standards for bar coding. National Cash Register began building efficient scanners and introduced their first model at the 1974 convention of the Super Market Institute. Six weeks later, on June 26, 1974 at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a package of Wrigley’s chewing gum was the first item ever scanned. Why a pack of gum? It just happened to be the first item out of the shopping cart of a now-nameless shopper. Today it is on display at the Smithsonian Institute.

A cashier entering digits by hand will average one error for every 350 characters, but a bar code scanner will make an error only once every 3,500,000 characters.

The UPC is composed of 12 digits. A single digit on the left identifies which type of product the item is: meat, produce, drug, etc. The next five digits identify the manufacturer, followed by five digits that identify the actual product. Every item scanned has its own unique ID number. A single digit on the right acts as a “check digit.” It adds up some of the previous numbers to come up with a magic “everything’s OK” number. For example, if someone has altered the code with a marker, the numbers won’t add up and the product will be rejected.

The identifying numerals are also printed along the bottom of the bar code for the sake of the cashiers, in case the scanner is down or the bar code has been partially obscured and the numbers need to be entered by hand.

The UPC only contains the manufacturer and the product, but this information is fed to a computer (the cash register), which knows the price of the item. It also acts as an inventory system, telling management how much of any given item is still on hand, how fast it’s being sold, when it will need to be reordered, how many coupons have been redeemed, and community purchasing patterns.

Bar codes are not just for pricing products. They are used:

• For tracking inventory on aircraft carriers

• For coding blood in blood banks

• For following applications in the Patent Office

• For identifying people in places like hospitals, libraries, and cafeterias

• For sorting baggage at airports

• For monitoring radio-collared animals

• For keeping track of logs in lumberyards

• For tracking the mating habits of bees (researchers put tiny bar codes on their backs)

• For tracking packages (Federal Express is probably the world’s biggest single user of bar code technology)

• For identifying ships in the Navy

• By runners in the New York City Marathon—they don bar codes on their vests and the computer records the order in which they cross the finish line

• To prevent scalping and theft of badges at the Masters Golf Tournament in Georgia

• By NASA to make sure the backs of heat-resistant tiles are installed on the correct spots of the space shuttles

• By the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to track the characteristics of hazardous materials (such as whether they’re explosive and how to control them), in case there’s an accident

Over a million companies worldwide use the UPC to identify their products. Equipment used to print, scan, and program bar codes amounts to a $16 billion-a-year business. It’s estimated that the codes are scanned five billion times a day across the planet.

Bernard Silver, who died in 1963 at the age of 38, never got to see his invention reach such phenomenal proportions. But Joseph Woodland was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Bush in 1992. Neither man made very much money from their invention.

Scientists in Spain have discovered what they believe to be dinosaur vomit. According to a paleontologist from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, it is the world’s oldest specimen. Age of the prehistoric puke: about 120 million years.

—
Wireless Flash News Service

Greater Los Angeles is bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined.

Imagine the boy next door trading in his Levi’s for fishnet stockings, his all-American sister sporting a sexy French maid’s outfit. It’s a scene that’s played out at movie theaters around the world every Saturday at midnight
—
all because starving actor/playwright Richard O’Brien needed to pay the rent.

In the early 1970s, Richard O’Brien had just been fired as a chorus boy in a musical on London’s version of Broadway, the West End. With no money and a wife and child to support, and lots of time on his hands, O’Brien penned a bizarre musical about cross-dressing, sex-starved aliens. He called it
The Rocky Horror Show.
And somehow, this weird show actually got produced. It opened at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1973 and was an amazing success; it was even named the best musical of the year.

Shortly after its debut, producer Lou Adler bought the play and moved it across the Atlantic to Los Angeles’ Roxy Theater, where it met with critical and audience acclaim. It also caught the eye of filmmakers at 20th Century Fox, who were sure that they could transform it into a hit movie. The film version starred newcomers Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, and the singer Meat Loaf. It took eight weeks to shoot and cost $ 1 million to make. But before the movie was released, the play opened in New York…and flopped.

Because the play had bombed, 20th Century Fox spent very little on publicity for the film, and it played in very few theaters. The movie initially had about as much success as the Broadway show—critics hated it and audiences stayed away in droves. It appeared that
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
was dead in the water.

But because of the play’s early success at the Roxy, the movie did well in Los Angeles, so Adler and a few others were convinced that the film just hadn’t found its audience. In 1976 a 20th Century Fox employee named Tim Deegan persuaded New York’s Waverly Theater, in the heart of bohemian Greenwich Village, to begin midnight showings. The tactic was tried in other select cities across the country as well. The hope was that it would catch on with cult audiences, just as offbeat films like
El Topo
and George Romero’s horror classic
Night of the Living Dead
had done.

A butterfly’s taste organs, located on its feet, are 2,400 times as sensitive as the human tongue.

Within months, a phenomenon began to take hold. Audiences decided to tear down the invisible wall that separated them from the on-screen action. They weren’t content just watching the movie from their seats—they began to dress as their favorite characters and perform along with the film, creating a show within a show. Seeing the movie became an interactive adventure; the
Rocky
experience was now part movie, part sing-along, part fashion show, and all party. Being in the audience at
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
now involved shouting lines at the screen, covering up with newspapers during scenes with rain, squirting water pistols to simulate rain in the theater, throwing rice during the wedding sequences, and dancing in the aisles doing the “Time Warp,” the film’s contagious anthem.

The
Rocky
phenomenon spread across the United States, giving birth to a midnight movie industry that spanned from major metropolitan areas right through to the straightlaced suburbs of America’s heartland.