NY TIMES
N. Joseph Woodland, who six decades ago drew a set of lines in the sand and in the process conceived the modern bar code. He was 91.
A retired mechanical engineer, Mr. Woodland was a graduate student when he and a classmate, Bernard Silver, created a technology — based on a printed series of wide and narrow striations — that encoded consumer-product information for optical scanning.
Their idea, developed in the late 1940s and patented 60 years ago this fall, turned out to be ahead of its time. But it would ultimately give rise to the universal product code, or U.P.C., as the staggeringly prevalent rectangular bar code is officially known.
The code now adorns tens of millions of different items, scanned in retail establishments around the world at the rate of more than five billion a day.