Who invented the barcode reader?

Answer 1

In 1948, Bernard Silver was a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia. A local food chain store owner had made an inquiry to the Drexel Institute asking about research into a method of automatically reading product information during checkout. Bernard Silver joined together with fellow graduate student Norman Joseph Woodland to work on a solution.

We can trace the idea of the modern bar code to around 1948, when a graduate student at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia heard a conversation between one of the faculty and an executive of a food store chain. The executive was trying to convince the faculty member to have the school develop a system to quickly and accurately capture product data at the check-out counter. The student, Bernie Silver related the conversation to Norman "Joe" Woodland, a teacher at the institute. The problem intrigued Woodland, and for the next 2 years he would experiment with a variety of data collection techniques to find the one that worked.

Woodland "invented" the first barcode, basically by using Morse code - a series of dots and dashes used in telegraph and radio communications. Woodland wrote out the dots and dash representation of the product number and extended the lines of each vertically creating the first linear barcode. To read the barcode, Woodland adapted the DeForest movie sound system from 20 years earlier that used a sensitive tube to detect the projector light shining through the side of the film. In the movie industry, the light detected would be converted into sound. In Woodland and Silver's adaptation, the reflected light would be converted to numbers.

Answer 2

bob and Fredinvented the awesome barcode!