wide and narrow striations
N. Joseph Woodland, who six decades ago drew a set of lines in the sand and in the process conceived the modern bar code, died on Sunday at his home in Edgewater, N.J. He was 91.
Earlier in his life Woodland stole away to spend time with his grandfather in Miami to focus on developing a code that could symbolically capture details about any item.
The only code Woodland knew was the Morse Code he'd learned in the Boy Scouts, his daughter said. One day, he drew Morse dots and dashes as he sat on the beach and absent-mindedly left his fingers in the sand where they traced a series of parallel lines.
"It was a moment of inspiration. He said, `instead of dots and dashes I can have thick and thin bars,"
Woodland joined IBM in 1951 hoping to develop the bar code, but the technology wasn't accepted for more than two decades until lasers made it possible to read the code readily.
Today, about 5 billion products are scanned and tracked worldwide every day.
Woodland was born Sept 6, 1921, in Atlantic City, N.J.
Woodland and Microsoft founder Bill Gates were among those honored at the White House in 1992 for their achievements to technology, four months after President George H.W. Bush appeared amazed at a demonstration of a grocery checkout machine.
For more on this story see these articles from the NY times and CBS:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57559140/bar-codes-co-inventor-n-joseph-woodland-dies-91/
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