Norman Joseph Woodland, the co-inventor of the bar code that labels nearly every product in stores and has boosted productivity in nearly every sector of commerce worldwide, has died in Edgewater, New Jersey, from the effects of Alzheimer's disease and complications of his advanced age. He was 91, Belfast Telegraph said.
Mr Woodland and Robert Silver were students at Philadelphia's Drexel University when Mr Silver overheard a grocery store executive asking an administrator to support research on how product information could be captured at checkouts.
The pair earned a patent in 1951 with Mr Woodland's idea to create a shape of concentric circles. The technology did not catch on until the 1970s, when Mr Woodland's employer IBM promoted a rectangular barcode that was adopted as the standard.
