Decoded

Joe did.

If you scanned Joe’s entire life you’d realize three things … he loved the beach, being a Boy Scout and Mechanical Engineering.

One day, Ben, a fellow graduate student at the university Joe was attending overheard a local supermarket executive asking the Dean for help with a problem the store was having. The Dean declined but Ben told Joe about it and together they tried figuring out solution after solution but with no luck.

Convinced they were close, Joe quit school and headed to his grandparent’s home in Florida to spend the winter literally sitting on the beach thinking of ways to solve the problem. One day swirling his fingers in the sand making Morse Code dots and dashes that he’d learned in the Boys Scouts … he had an inspiration! He told Ben and together they wrote a patent. But didn’t it go anywhere so grudgingly they sold it off and went on to get other jobs. Fast forward 17 years and the patent expired .. about the same time IBM won a competition to help all nation’s supermarkets solve the exact same problem .. and you can’t imagine the surprise at IBM when they found out that Joe already worked for them. Transferred to the project, Joe picked up right where he left off and helped develop it further. Finally, the solution was rolled out in the first supermarket in 1974 … 25 long years after Joe’s inspiration on that Florida beach.

Today, what Joe and Ben helped create is literally everywhere on every product you buy. The Barcode

The Barcode is a great idea … sometimes hanging out at the beach can really pay off.