Norman Joseph Woodland
More info
- Born
- Died
- Known for
- The barcode patent, work on UPC at IBM
- Nationality
- American
The man who dragged four fingers through the sand on Miami Beach and thereby invented the idea of encoding digits as bars of varying width.
The prompt came from a grocery executive who asked the Drexel Institute to solve the problem of reading products at the checkout. Woodland took it on with Bernard Silver, and in January 1949 he was sitting on a Florida beach thinking about Morse code. Dots and dashes, pulled downward, became lines of different widths. Since a cashier cannot be expected to hold the product the right way up, he bent them into concentric circles — a bullseye readable from any angle.
The patent issued in 1952. The technology simply did not exist: lasers and integrated circuits were two decades out, and the pair sold the patent on for $15,000, the only money either of them ever saw from it. Woodland joined IBM and was there when his colleague George Laurer put the rectangular UPC symbol on the table in the 1970s. Silver died in 1963, eleven years before the first pack of chewing gum was scanned in Ohio.