August 17, 2016

Future barcode inventors Bernard Silver and Norman Joseph Woodland graduate. The idea that would change how people purchase goods starts when Silver, a graduate student, overhears the president of a food chain asking a dean to start a research project to invent a way to read product data automatically at checkout. He mentions it to Woodland, a fellow graduate student and teacher, and together they came up with the concept of a barcode reader. They filed a patent in 1949 and in 1962 sold the invention to industry.