Joseph Woodland, a graduate student at the Drexel Institute
of Technology, noticed that the institute had been asked by a local chain of
grocery retailers to figure out a way to encode product data, so that the
checkout process could be automated. This was 1948.
One day, sitting on the beach, “I poked my four fingers into
the sand and for whatever reason – I don’t know – I pulled my hand toward me
and drew four lines,” he told Smithsonian magazine many years later.
And, thinking of the Morse code he had learned in Boy
Scouts, Woodland realised that lines of varying widths could be turned into a
code. He worked with a colleague, Bernard Silver, to develop a bullseye
solution, but it didn’t catch on. So they sold the patent.
Over the next two decades, manufacturers and retailers
developed a range of systems, and in the early 1970s a standardised approach
emerged. It’s now estimated that barcodes are scanned some five billion times a
day, saving trillions of dollars/pounds etc.
Joseph Woodland died ten days ago, on 9 December 2012, aged
91.
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