Norman Woodland dead: Bar code inventor dies aged 91
Bar code inventor Norman Woodland has died aged 91.
Norman and friend Bernard Silver devised the bar code while studying engineering at university.
It was based on the Morse code that Norman had learned as a Boy Scout.
The pair applied for the world’s first bar code patent in 1949.
But it would be more than two decades before laser technology would advance to the point where it could be applied to the bar code.
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.
Today five billion products a day are scanned optically using a bar code.