The co-inventor of the bar code, Norman Joseph Woodland, has died at the age of 91. He died “Sunday in Edgewater, N.J., from the effects of Alzheimer’s disease and complications of his advanced age,” the AP reports.
Woodland and Bernard Silver were students at what is now called Drexel University in Philadelphia when Silver overheard a grocery-store executive asking an engineering school dean to channel students into research on how product information could be captured at checkout, Susan Woodland said.
Woodland notably had worked on the Manhattan Project, the U.S. military’s atomic bomb development team. And having already earned a mechanical engineering degree, Woodland dropped out of graduate school to work on the bar code idea. He stole away to spend time with his grandfather in Miami to focus on developing a code that could symbolically capture details about an item, [his daughter Susan Woodland said]