Qahir Dhanani

The next time you take an international trip, do me a favor.

Take a look at your passport.

On the cover, there's your country's coat of arms.

And then you open it, and there's your photograph.

The best one you've ever taken, right?

On that page...

there's two lines at the bottom, letters and numbers.

That's called the machine-readable zone.

Those two lines are magic, the product of international cooperation.

Because without them, you wouldn't be able to get on that plane.

You wouldn't be able to cross immigration.

You wouldn't be able to travel the world, see your family.

Now, what I find fascinating is that those two lines came about in 1980 when the International Civil Aviation Organization set about standardizing passports.

At the beginning, only three countries adopted the standard.

Today, just about every single country has that standard.

This is international cooperation at its best.

And it doesn't stop there.

Did you know that 160 years ago, 20 countries came together to lay the foundations of our global telecommunications networks?

They founded something called the International Telegraph Union, or the ITU.

It's still active today, although it's moved on from the telegraph.