Norman Joseph Woodland, a 1947 graduate, who, along with classmate Bernard Silver, created the system for instant electronic recall of product information commonly called the barcode, passed away at the age of 91 on Dec. 9, 2012. The pair’s invention revolutionized the retail industry and is an example of a technology that has stood the test of time.
“We lost a great inventor and a contributor to the world of engineering,” says Dr. Joseph Hughes, dean of Drexel’s College of Engineering. “Mr. Woodland was a role model and an inspiration for our students. We are greatly saddened by this loss and our condolences are with the Woodland family at this time.”
Woodland’s passing comes in the same year as the 60th anniversary of the barcode’s invention. Woodland graduated from Drexel Institute of Technology with a degree in mechanical engineering and continued his post-graduate studies at the school. In 1948, the head of a local grocery store chain came to Drexel in hopes of tapping the institution’s engineering school to develop a way to read product data during the checkout process. When the dean of the school turned down the offer, Silver and Woodland seized the opportunity.
At the time, card-reading equipment that was used in stores was bulky and expensive. Woodland’s early inspirations for the barcode came from Morse code—a system of dots and dashes used to send coded messages via the telegraph, which he had learned when he was a Boy Scout.
While he was staying with his grandparents in Miami in the winter of 1948, Woodland’s moment of clarity struck as he sat on the beach drawing with his fingers in the sand.
“I just extended the dots and dashes downwards and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them,” Woodland said in a Wonders of Modern Technology article.
To read the codes, Woodland came up with a way of shining light through the lines to a light sensitive tube on the other side that converted the varying brightness of the light coming through the paper into electric waves that could be processed to deliver information. Silver crafted the original coding pattern, which was in the form of a bull’s eye—so that it could be scanned in any direction. The engineers received a patent for their invention, called “Classifying Apparatus and Method,” on Oct. 7, 1952.