The man who saved shoppers countless hours on the supermarket checkout line has died. Norman Woodland, co-inventor of the bar code, transformed global commerce in the 1970s. He, along with the late Bernard Silver, patterned the idea in 1947, but wasn’t until laser technology emerged three decades later that the concept gained worldwide use.
The first bar code scan took place on June 26, 1974, in Troy, Ohio, when a cashier scanned a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum for shopper Clyde Dawson, according to IBM. Cost: 67 cents. A revolutionary technology was born.
Today, five billion products a day are scanned optically using the bar code, or Universal Product Code, or UPC, according to Reuters. Handheld laser scanners now inventory consumer products, move passengers through airline gates, track mail, encode patient medical information, and occupy essential roles in the transportation, industrial and shipping sectors.
And no, the concept behind the bar code was not a zebra. It was Morse code.
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