On 26 June 1974, at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a cashier passed a UPC barcode over a scanner for the very first time. The item was a ten-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum, priced at 67 cents. That pack is now held by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Since then, the barcode has conquered world trade: according to standards body GS1, barcodes are scanned billions of times a day.
That's the estimate from a WHO-led study published in The Lancet in 2024, covering the half-century since the Expanded Programme on Immunization was launched in 1974. It works out to about six lives saved every minute, mostly infants. The measles vaccine alone accounts for around 60% of those lives.
According to the World Gold Council, about 216,000 tonnes of gold have been mined in all of human history. Because gold is so dense (19.3 tonnes per cubic metre), it would fit in a cube about 22 metres on each side, roughly the height of a seven-storey building. Strikingly, about two-thirds of it has been mined since 1950.