Bar code inventor Norman Woodland dies at 91

New York: The inventor of the bar code, which originated six decades ago and revolutionised product labeling, has died at the age of 91.

Woodland was a graduate student when he and a classmate, Bernard Silver, created a technology, based on a printed series of wide and narrow striations, that encoded consumer-product information for optical scanning.

Their idea, developed in the late 1940s and patented 60 years ago, turned out to be ahead of its time, and the two men together made only USD 15,000 from it.

But the curious round symbol they devised would ultimately give rise to the Universal Product Code, or U.P.C., as the staggeringly prevalent rectangular bar code (it graces tens of millions of different items) is officially known.

Woodland was born in Atlantic City on September 6, 1921. As a Boy Scout he learned Morse code, the spark that would ignite his invention.

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.

“What I’m going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale,” 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. I said: ‘Golly! Now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes’.”
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