Norman Woodland American engineer, one of the inventors of the barcode Date of Birth: 06.09.1921 Country: USA

Biography of Norman Joseph Woodland

Norman Joseph Woodland was an American engineer and one of the inventors of the barcode. He was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, into a Jewish family and was the eldest of two sons. Woodland attended Drexel Institute of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering and obtained a Bachelor's degree.

During World War II, Woodland participated in the Manhattan Project as one of the staff technicians. From 1948 to 1949, he also lectured on engineering at his alma mater. In 1948, Woodland's friend, Bernard Silver, overheard a conversation between a local supermarket representative and the head of the college department about the development of a method for automatic product information retrieval. Although the negotiations did not lead to anything, Silver found the task interesting and proposed it to Woodland, who quickly recognized its potential.

Woodland left his teaching position, gathered some savings, and went to Florida to stay with his grandfather. It was on the beach that Woodland recalled the Morse code and began tracing messages with his fingers in the sand. After removing his fingers from the resulting drawing, he noticed a distinctive mark and conceived the idea of using a two-dimensional form of the Morse code. Woodland shared this concept with Silver, and together, they developed it further and obtained a patent. Notably, the original patent described not only linear (straight) barcodes but also circular ones resembling targets.

In 1951, Woodland joined IBM. However, he and Silver failed to convince their superiors of the potential of their invention. In 1952, they sold the patent to Philco for $15,000. Later, the patent was acquired by RCA, who spent a long time trying to apply it but achieved no success before the patent expired in 1969. In the same year, RCA reached out to the National Association of Food Chains, resulting in the establishment of a committee for the standardization of grocery item codes.

IBM did not want to be left behind. They remembered Woodland's project and contacted him, relocating him to North Carolina, where he developed the Universal Product Code (UPC) and surpassed RCA's efforts. In 1974, the first product with a barcode, a pack of chewing gum, was scanned in a supermarket in Ohio. Norman Woodland passed away on December 9, 2012.