Norman Joseph Woodland, co-inventor of bar code at Drexel, dies at 91

Tom Paine
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Norman Joseph Woodland, who co-invented the bar code while he was a graduate student at Drexel University, died on December 9 in Edgewater, NJ, at the age of 91, the New York Times reported today.

Woodland and Bernard Silver developed the bar code at Drexel in the late 1940's and received a patent on it in 1952. However, the now-ubiquitous technology was not implemented in the supermarket industry until 1974.

I wrote about Woodland and Silver on the 60th anniversary of the issuance of the patent two months ago.

Woodland ended up working up at IBM, where he had a role in commercializing the bar code, retiring in 1987. Silver died in 1963.

While the patent itself was sought after and was acquired by Philco and later sold to
RCA, my sense is that it wasn't terribly lucrative for the co-inventors.




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Bar code patent issued 60 years ago today to Drexel researchers

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Tom Paine

Illustration from original bar code  patent

The first patent for a bar code was issued to Drexel researchers Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver on this day 60 years ago (October 7, 1952). Woodland and Silver began working on the concept as graduate students in 1948, and filed the patent application in 1949. By 1951 Woodland had moved to IBM, where he tried to encourage development of the patent. IBM was not interested in that at the time but did offer to buy the patent, but was turned down. Philco later purchased the patent in 1962 and then sold it to RCA.

Silver later taught physics at Drexel but died in 1963 at the age of 38. Woodland, who just turned 91, later had a role in helping IBM implement the bar code.


The bar code did not come into widespread commercial use until the mid-1970s. IBM and the supermarket industry led efforts to develop standards, and with the invention of Uniform Product Code (U.P.C) in 1973, the use of bar codes in supermarkets first began in 1974.

This infographic published by a bar code technology firm gives a short version of the bar code's history.



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