60 years ago, two Drexel grad students invented the barcode

Sixty years ago, inspired by Morse code, Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver patented the barcode. They were graduate students at what was then known as the Drexel Institute of Technology.

Last week, Drexel University and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) celebrated the invention by dedicating an IEEE Milestone to Woodland and Silver. The IEEE Milestone program is meant to honor significant contributions to engineering and technology.

Here’s a little back story, from the press release:

Norman Joseph Woodland’s yearbook photo.

In 1948, the head of a local grocery store chain came to Drexel in hopes of tapping the institution’s engineering brainpower to develop a way to read product data during the checkout process. At the time, card reading equipment that was used in stores was bulky and expensive. Early inspirations for the barcode came from Morse code – a system of dots and dashes used to send coded messages via the telegraph.

“I just extended the dots and dashes downwards and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them,” Woodland said in a Wonders of Modern Technology article.

To read the codes, Woodland came up with a way of shining light through the lines to a light sensitive tube on the other side that converted the varying brightness of the light coming through the paper into electric waves that could be process to deliver information. Silver crafted the original coding system, which was in the form of a bull’s eye – so that it could be scanned in any direction. The engineers filed for a patent on the system on Oct. 20, 1949.

Bernard Silver’s yearbook photo.

The barcode was first used in grocery stores in 1966 and saw widespread use after the Universal Grocery Products Identification Code was created in 1970 to standardize common grocery items. Today the system is used around the world and has also become important to the medical field where it is used to retrieve patient information. In 2011 Silver and Woodland were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Related: 11 living computer and Internet pioneers with Philadelphia ties