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ticket punches

To: BRHSlist@yahoogroups.com
Subject: ticket punches
From: jworones@y...
Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 20:51:01 -0000
User-agent: eGroups-EW/0.82
Here's an amazingly useless but neat fact I came across today.

In the Spring 2001 issue of American Heritage of Invention & 
Technology, there's a short article on the development of the punch 
card. What's interesting is:

"...One day in the early 1880s, the inventor Herman Hollerith noticed 
that his railroad ticket was perforated with a peculiar pattern of 
holes. Each hole, he learned, had been punched in a specific place to 
correspond to a specific physical characteristic: height, eye color, 
size of nose, and so forth. Conductors did this to keep someone from 
picking a discarded ticket and pretending it was his own."

There you have it!

Jeff Worones
Las Vegas, NV


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