Norman Joseph Woodland, the co-inventor of the bar code that labels nearly every product in stores and has boosted productivity in nearly every sector of commerce worldwide, has died. He was 91...

Woodland notably had worked on the Manhattan Project, the U.S. military's atomic bomb development team. And having already earned a mechanical engineering degree, Woodland dropped out of graduate school to work on the bar code idea. He stole away to spend time with his grandfather in Miami to focus on developing a code that could symbolically capture details about an item, Susan Woodland.

The only code Woodland knew was the Morse Code he'd learned in the Boy Scouts, his daughter said. One day, he drew Morse dots and dashes as he sat on the beach and absent-mindedly left his fingers in the sand where they traced a series of parallel lines.

"It was a moment of inspiration. He said, `instead of dots and dashes I can have thick and thin bars,'" Susan Woodland said.

Woodland and Silver submitted their patent in 1949 for a code patterned on concentric circles that looked like a bull's eye. The patent was issued in 1952, 60 years ago this fall. Silver died in 1963.

Now boys and girls, there's a guy few if any of us have ever heard about (I know I haven't) yet who had a tremendous impact on all our lives.

Fascinating.
http://www.philly.com/philly/business/20...landdies91.html

I wonder if he will have a barcode on his tombstone instead of letters?

BTW, does anyone even remember anymore when groceries had price stickers and it was a huge score to find a can of soup that was stickered with a lower price than the others?