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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