“He knew the technology didn’t exist at the moment, but that it would exist.”
— Susan Woodland, daughter of Joseph Woodland, who invented the bar code on the beach, by running four fingers through the sand, as he attempted to answer a grocery executive’s call for a way to track products. Woodland, a mechanical engineer who died Sunday in New Jersey at age 91, reportedly told the story this way: “I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason — I didn’t know — I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. I said: ‘Golly! Now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes.’ ” But he actually kept going and drew a full circle, the design he favored. Woodland and fellow Philadelphia college student Bernard Silver were awarded a patent in 1952 for a bull’s-eye-shaped Classifying Apparatus and Method, according to the New York Times. They sold the patent for $15,000. In the 1970s, when Woodland was working for IBM, colleague George Laurer designed the rectangular bar code as we now know it, and it was given a boost by Alan Haberman, a supermarket executive who died last year. (SeeQuoted: on the bar code, IBM and tech history.) The first product ever sold that was scanned with a UPC symbol? A pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum for 67 cents, at a supermarket in Ohio in 1974, according to the Guardian.
