When Norm Woodland was a Boy Scout in the 1930s, he learned Morse Code — he liked that kind of thing much better than other boy scout stuff like camping and tying knots. They might not have used the term in those days, but Norm was a nerd. After he celebrated his 18th birthday (on September 6), he joined the military. They made him a technical assistant in the Manhattan Project. After World War II he got an engineering degree from Drexel Institute of Technology (it’s now Drexel University), then stayed on as a lecturer.
While he was at Drexel, he and his friend Bernie Silver overheard a conversation the dean of engineering had with the president of a grocery company asking if there was any way to automatically figure out which products a customer was buying, and what the prices were supposed to be. They gave that some serious thought and came up with something they thought just might work.
A talented young engineer in 1950s had plenty of opportunities, and Woodland joined IBM. When he arrived, he already had a patent — but he couldn’t find anyone at IBM interested in developing it further. So he sold it to Philco, which was a big manufacturer of TVs and radios at the time. Philco sold the patent to RCA, which did start working on it.
IBM finally got interested in 1971. Even though they’d missed their chance to own the patent, it had expired in 1969 anyway. But when they found out (again) that Woodland was the original inventor, they transferred him to the team working on the project, and they eventually brought it to market. To all the markets, in fact.
In 1974, in an Ohio supermarket, Norm Woodland’s invention from the late 1940s was finally put into use. Somebody bought a pack of chewing gum and for the first time ever, the store scanned the Universal Product Code that Woodland had invented. He later explained that he got the idea from Morse Code, which he still remembered from Boy Scouts.
