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  3. Norman Joseph Woodland was born in Atlantic City on Sept.6, 1921. As a Boy S

Norman Joseph Woodland was born in Atlantic City on Sept.6, 1921. As a Boy S

游客2023-12-28  14
问题     Norman Joseph Woodland was born in Atlantic City on Sept.6, 1921. As a Boy Scout he learned Morse code, the spark that would ignite his invention.
    After spending World War II on the Manhattan Project, Mr. Woodland resumed his studies at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia (it is now Drexel University), earning a bachelor’s degree in 1947.
    As an undergraduate, Mr. Woodland perfected a system for delivering elevator music efficiently. He planned to pursue the project commercially, but his father, who had come of age in "Boardwalk Empire" -era Atlantic City, forbade it: elevator music, he said, was controlled by the mob, and no son of his was going to come within spitting distance.
    The younger Mr. Woodland returned to Drexel for a master’s degree. In 1948, a local supermarket executive visited the campus, where he implored a dean to develop an efficient means of encoding product data. The dean demurred, but Mr. Silver, a fellow graduate student who overheard their conversation, was intrigued. He conscripted Mr. Woodland.
    An early idea of theirs, which involved printing product information in fluorescent ink and reading it with ultraviolet light, proved unworkable.
    But Mr. Woodland, convinced that a solution was close at hand, quit graduate school to devote himself to the problem. He holed up at his grandparents’ home in Miami Beach, where he spent the winter of 1948-49 in a chair in the sand, thinking.
    To represent information visually, he realized, he would need a code. The only code he knew was the one he had learned in the Boy Scouts.
    What would happen, Mr. Woodland wondered one day, if Morse code, with its elegant simplicity and limitless combinatorial potential, were adapted graphically? He began trailing his fingers idly through the sand.
    "What I’m going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale, " Mr. Woodland told Smithsonian magazine in 1999. "I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason—I didn’t know—I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. Now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes. "
    Today, bar codes appears on the surface of almost every product of contemporary life. All because a bright young man, his mind ablaze with dots and dashes, one day raked his fingers through the sand.
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答案     诺曼.约瑟夫.伍德兰1921年9月6日出生于亚特兰大市。在童子军时期，他学习了摩斯密码，而这竟成了点燃其创造力的火花。
    二战期间伍德兰先生参与了“曼哈顿工程”，战后他在费城的德雷克赛尔理工学院（现德雷克赛尔大学）重拾学业，并于1947年获得学士学位。
    还是在读学生的时候，伍德兰先生改进了一个能高效播放电梯背景音乐的系统。他计划对这个改进项目进行商业开发，但在《大西洋帝国》中所描写的那个时代的亚特兰大市长大的父亲不允许他这么做（那个禁酒的时代黑帮为控制酒类黑市而相互火并)。他说，电梯背景音乐一行是黑帮控制的，他的儿子绝不可以与这一行靠的太近。
    于是当时还年轻的伍德兰先生重返德雷克赛尔理工学院攻读硕士学位。在1948年的某天，一位当地超市的高管参观学院的校园，那位高管恳求一位院长帮忙开发一种能给产品信息编码的方式。那位院长推辞了，但听到他们对话的研究生西尔弗却很感兴趣。他让伍德兰先生加入他一起研究。
    他们的一个早期想法是利用荧光墨打印超信息，然后用紫外线光读取信息，但这种想法证明并行不通。
    但伍德兰先生却坚信可行的办法就在眼前，于是他放弃研究生学业来全身心研究这一问题的解决办法。他在边阿密海滩上的祖父母家里闭关思考，1948年到1949年的那个冬天他都躺在沙滩上：的一把椅子上苦思冥想。
    他意识到，要想视觉化地呈现信息，他将需要一种密码。他所知道的唯一密码就是童子军时期他学习的摩斯密码。
    有一大，伍德兰先生这样想: 如果具有完美简洁性和无限组合可能的摩斯密码被改编成图形会发生什么呢？他开始用手指在沙子里漫不经心地划来划去。
    “下面我要讲的听起来有些像童话，”伍德兰先生1999年对《史密森学会杂志》说道。“我把四个手指插进沙子里，然后我自己也不知出于何故就手向身体方向拉，这样就划出四条线。我白言道：天哪！现在我有了四条线，它们可粗可细而不是(摩斯密码所用的）点和线”。
    如今，条形码出现在几乎每一件当代生活的产品表面上。而这一切都是因为一位满脑充斥点和线的聪慧青年某天在沙子上划动手指。
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