Welcome back. This is session seven, and I have a couple more stories to tell you about these masterpieces, things that we use every day, that perhaps we don't always ask ourselves, how did this happen, who came up with the idea? So two more humble masterpieces, the bar code That we use all the time, used everywhere all over. And the story of the Frisbee. Start with the bar code. The bar code was invented by Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver. The story is this, also told in the book Humble Masterpieces. So, in 1948, the president of a local food chain asked one of the deans of Drexel Institute of Technology. This is a science and technology university in Philadelphia. Asked the dean to develop a system for automatically reading product information during check out. The idea was that you would scan some sort of code rather than have to punch it in by hand every single time. And a graduate student at Drexel overheard this conversation with the Dean, enlisted a friend. They did some research, and they came up with an idea, [COUGH] patterns of light that would glow under ultraviolet light. So, that turned out to be unstable and expensive. Notice the importance here of failure, you have to try things. They tried one thing, it didn't work. So then they came up with a barcode idea. Which was concentric circles of dark and light. ANd that was the code for products very close to today's bar code. Today's bar code are just linear sort of straight lines. Theirs was concentric circles but a very similar idea And they noted that the more lines you added, the more things you could code. This idea was born on October 20, 1949. That's the birthday of the barcode. And they filed a patent application for their idea. Patents now are first to file. If you have an idea, even if someone had it before you, if you file a patent application, well, that idea is yours. Took a long time for this idea to be implemented. It took some 20, 25 years, till 1974, that the first scanner using what's called the UPC, the Universal Product code, which is what we use today, was installed in a supermarket in Troy, Ohio. And the first product to be scanned with a bar code was a package of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum and of course the idea has now spread. The story of the Frisbee, and this is something that all of you will be familiar with, and it has a very interesting story, something that we can learn about regarding creativity. Long time ago in the 1870s, there was a baker named William Russell Frisbie. His name was spelled F-R-I-S-B-I-E, and he owned the Frisbie Baking Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut. He began printing the company name on the bottom of the tin pans in which sold his company's homemade pies. And these pies were sold throughout Connecticut, including in New Haven, where there was the famous Ivy League university named Yale University. Yale students used to buy the pies, and then they found that they could take the pie tins, and they could sail them through the air, and they could be tossed and caught. So, in 1948, someone designed a saucer-like plastic dish, or a disc for playing catch. They called it the flying saucer. But, a company called Wham-O discovered the Frisbee idea, gave it the name Frisbee. They spelled it a little different. F-R-I-S-B E-E and introduced the Wham-O Frisbee to the world. They took it on tour around Ivy League campuses, and the students there told the Wham-O company that they'd actually been doing the same with pie plates for many many years. So, sometimes, invention can emerge from just observing people and then actually trying to perfect it. Seeing how they've used a product in an unusual way. And then make that into something that you can provide widely for everybody. Every product we use has a story like this of creative people who saw something that other people didn't see. If we try to simplify the story of creativity and the humble masterpieces that we use that enrich our lives every single day. And that we tend to ignore because they're so much part of our life we take them for granted. Every humble masterpiece represents something where a creative person saw something other people didn't see. They saw a way that a pie plate could be used as something that could entertain people and give them an athletic activity. We have extreme frisbee now, real game, a real sport, which is played competitively and brings great pleasure to a lot of people. And the design is just so, so simple. A disk that when you spin it, can go for long distances, and play an enjoyable game of catch. The bar code, started with a real problem, somebody came with a defined problem. And the inventors discovered a creative solution that was both implementable and practical after an initial failure. Creative people see things that other people just don't see. That means we need to If we want to be creative, we need to sharpen our vision. We need to really look at things, we need to really see things when other people just look and walk on by. That ends session seven and our stories of humble masterpieces and we're next going to go on in section eight. We're going to talk about the seven challenges, the big global challenges we're asking you to try to crack with your creativity.