The Invention of the Barcode

Philadelphia, 1948. Inside the engineering building at Drexel Institute of Technology, a supermarket chain president stood in the dean's office making a specific plea: find some automatic way to capture product information at checkout, because delays at the register and constant manual restocking counts were eating into store profits. The dean turned him down flat. It was not his problem to solve. But sitting nearby, close enough to catch every word, was a Drexel graduate student named Bernard Silver, an electrical engineering major who had graduated the year before, in 1947. The idea would not leave him. Silver did not have an answer either, but he knew someone who might. He brought the problem to his friend Norman Joseph Woodland, a 1947 Drexel mechanical-engineering graduate who had spent the war years as a technical assistant on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge and who, as a Boy Scout years earlier, had learned Morse code. Woodland had the kind of mind that turned problems over sideways. The two started meeting informally, off any university clock, kicking around ways a machine might read a product's identity without a person keying in a single number. Their first idea involved light. Not visible light, ultraviolet, shone onto ink invisible to the naked eye. It seemed promising enough to try building.