Inventor of the Bar Code Dies

N. Joseph Woodland, Inventor of the Bar Code, Dies at 91

By MARGALIT FOX

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.

His daughter Susan Woodland confirmed the death.

A retired mechanical engineer, Mr. Woodland was a graduate student when he and a classmate, Bernard Silver, created a technology — based on a printed series of wide and narrow striations — that encoded consumer-product information for optical scanning.

Their idea, developed in the late 1940s and patented 60 years ago this fall, turned out to be ahead of its time. But it would ultimately give rise to the universal product code, or U.P.C., as the staggeringly prevalent rectangular bar code is officially known.

The code now adorns tens of millions of different items, scanned in retail establishments around the world at the rate of more than five billion a day.

The bar code would never have developed as it did without a chain of events noteworthy even in the annals of invention etiology:

Had Mr. Woodland not been a Boy Scout, had he not logged hours on the beach and had his father not been quite so afraid of organized crime, the code would very likely not have been invented in the form it was, if at all.

Norman Joseph Woodland was born in Atlantic City on Sept. 6, 1921. As a Boy Scout he learned Morse code, the spark that would ignite his invention.

After spending World War II on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Mr. Woodland resumed his studies at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia (it is now Drexel University), earning a bachelor's degree in 1947.

As an undergraduate, Mr. Woodland perfected a system for delivering elevator music efficiently. His system, which recorded 15 simultaneous audio tracks on 35-millimeter film stock, was less cumbersome than existing methods, which relied on LPs and reel-to-reel tapes.

He planned to pursue the project commercially, but his father, who had come of age in "Boardwalk Empire"-era Atlantic City, forbade it: elevator music, he said, was controlled by the mob, and no son of his was going to come within spitting distance.

The younger Mr. Woodland returned to Drexel for a master's degree. In 1948, a local supermarket executive visited the campus, where he implored a dean to develop an efficient means of encoding product data.

The dean demurred, but Mr. Silver, a fellow graduate student who overheard their conversation, was intrigued. He conscripted Mr. Woodland.

An early idea of theirs, which involved printing product information in fluorescent ink and reading it with ultraviolet light, proved unworkable.

But Mr. Woodland, convinced that a solution was close at hand, quit graduate school to devote himself to the problem. He holed up at his grandparents' home in Miami Beach, where he spent the winter of 1948-49 in a chair in the sand, thinking.

To represent information visually, he realized, he would need a code. The only code he knew was the one he had learned in the Boy Scouts.

What would happen, Mr. Woodland wondered one day, if Morse code, with its elegant simplicity and limitless combinatorial potential, were adapted graphically? He began trailing his fingers idly through the sand.

"What I'm going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale," Mr. Woodland told Smithsonian magazine in 1999. "I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason — I didn't know — I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. I said: 'Golly! Now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes.' "

That transformative sweep was merely the beginning. "Only seconds later," Mr. Woodland continued, "I took my four fingers — they were still in the sand — and I swept them around into a full circle."

Mr. Woodland favored the circular pattern for its omnidirectionality: a checkout clerk, he reasoned, could scan a product without regard for its orientation.

On Oct. 7, 1952, Mr. Woodland and Mr. Silver were awarded United States patent 2,612,994 for their invention — a variegated bull's-eye of wide and narrow bands — on which they had bestowed the unromantic name "Classifying Apparatus and Method."

But that method, which depended on an immense scanner equipped with a 500-watt light, was expensive and unwieldy, and it languished for years.

The two men eventually sold their patent to Philco for $15,000 — all they ever made from their invention.

By the time the patent expired at the end of the 1960s, Mr. Woodland was on the staff of I.B.M., where he worked from 1951 until his retirement in 1987.

Over time, laser scanning technology and the advent of the microprocessor made the bar code viable. In the early 1970s, an I.B.M. colleague, George J. Laurer, designed the familiar black-and-white rectangle, based on the Woodland-Silver model and drawing on Mr. Woodland's considerable input.

Thanks largely to the work of Alan Haberman, a supermarket executive who helped select and popularize the rectangular bar code and who died in 2011, it was adopted as the industry standard in 1973.

Mr. Woodland, who earned a master's in mechanical engineering from Syracuse University in the 1950s, received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 1992. Last year, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. (Mr. Silver, who died in 1963, was inducted posthumously along with him.)

Besides his daughter Susan, Mr. Woodland is survived by his wife, the former Jacqueline Blumberg, whom he married in 1951; another daughter, Betsy Karpenkopf; a brother, David; and a granddaughter.

Today, the bar code graces nearly every surface of contemporary life — including groceries, wayward luggage and, if you are a traditionalist, the newspaper you are holding — all because a young man, his mind ablaze with dots and dashes, one day raked his fingers through the sand.

NYT

The 2012 Books You Missed But Shouldn’t Have

Here are 11 books that might have flown under the radar but shouldn't be overlooked.

'Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars' by Sonia Faleiro. 240 pp. Black Cat. $15.

The subtitle does not lie: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars.Faleiro chronicles that world through the experience of 19-year-old exotic dancer Leela, who seems more like Faleiro's close friend than a reporting subject, and the Bombay club scene bears upon you as if it were your own neighborhood.

'Brothers: On His Brothers and Brothers in History' by George Howe Colt. 480 pp. Scribner. $30.

The story of Colt's relationship with his three brothers—the adored Harry, the emo Ned, the troubled Mark—is woven around entertaining anecdotes of famous siblings like Edwin and John Wilkes Booth and Theo and Vincent van Gogh. A perfect gimmick that makes this book even livelier than The Big House.

'Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat' by Bee Wilson. 352 pp. Basic Books. $27.

A book to keep at your side as you cook. Consider the fork. It's a piercing, sharp weapon associated with the Devil. How did this unlikely tool become the West's most popular and indispensable utensil? Wilson serves up brisk histories of everything you use in the kitchen.

'A Ditch in Time: The City, the West and Water' by Patricia Nelson Limerick, Jason Hanson (Contributor). 352 pp. Fulcrum Publishing. $20.

The first book in 25 years by MacArthur-winning historian Limerick is an entertaining history of the Denver Water Board. (Stealing, even stealing water, is always good copy.) Best of all, this deftly wrought history banishes our complacency about where water originates.

'It's Fine By Me: A Novel' by Per Petterson. Translated by Don Bartlett. 208 pp. Graywolf Press. $20.

In this coming-of-age novel about a tenacious teen boy with a nose for trouble, Petterson, author of the critically acclaimed sleeper hit Out Stealing Horses, tells his story in sentences so full of momentum that they insist on being read.

'Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet' by Andrew Blum. 304 pp. Ecco. $27.

Most books about the Internet tell us how it's ruining our minds and social lives, but Blum does something far more interesting and ambitious: he sets out to figure out how it actually physically works. He follows all the cables and cords that crisscross our oceans and our floors.

'Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy' by Douglas Smith. 496 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $30.

It may seem strange in the midst of economic turmoil to urge readers to spend time with the last Russian aristocrats as they watched their palaces sacked and their family members hunted down by Stalin. But Smith tells a mesmerizing tale 
of how glamorous toffs figured out how to survive.

'Life Goes On: A Novel' by Hans Keilson. Translated by Damion Searls. 272 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $15.

Two years ago Dutch-Jewish writer and psycho-analyst Keilson was discovered by the English-speaking world at the age of 101 for novels he wrote decades before. Now his first novel—an autobiographical story set in Germany after World War I—has been gloriously translated. There will sadly be no more of his fine prose as he died last year.

'Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic' by David Quammen. 592pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $29.

The scariest book you'll read this year. Science journalist Quammen explores the nastiest, most virulent diseases on earth—and says that more 
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'Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II' by Keith Lowe. 480 pp. St. Martin's Press. $30.

How do you end a war? A peace treaty often means nothing for the millions displaced, injured, and seeking revenge, as Lowe brilliantly shows in his history of ravaged Europe after the end of World War II. The relative success of the European Union seems all the more remarkable in light of 
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'When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail' by Eric Jay Dolin. 416 pp. Liveright. $28.

Amidst the U.S.'s election-year demagoguery against China, Dolin's engaging history of the origins of trade between the two countries proves that we've been making insane amounts off China for centuries—and that the growth of American capitalism is inextricable from the East.