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.
但是，伍德兰先生确信解决方案就近在咫尺，毅然退学专心攻克这一难关。1948到1949年的那个冬天他寄居在迈阿密海滩的祖父母家，一人坐在沙滩的椅子上冥思苦想。
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.
他意识到，要想将信息视觉化，必须进行编码，而他只知道当童子军时学习过的编码。
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.
有一天，伍德兰先生突然想到，摩斯密码简便优雅，还可以进行无限组合，如果将这种密码平面化处理会怎么样呢?于是，他开始用手指不经意地在沙滩上划来划去。
“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.’ ”
1999年在接受《史密森尼(Smithsonian)》杂志采访时伍德兰先生说，“这听起来非常不可思议，我将四个手指插入沙中，然后莫名地将手向后拉，随手画出了四条线，宽窄不一，不再是由点和破折号构成。”
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.
时至今日，我们生活中几乎所有的产品都有条形码，这都要归功于伍德兰先生。正是伍德兰先生年轻时靠着自己的聪明才智和满脑子的点与破折号在那天将自己的手指从沙子中划过才有了今天无处不在的条形码。
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