Born in Atlantic City, NJ, Norman Joseph Woodland became interested in the supermarket checkout process when he was teaching mechanical engineering at the Drexel Institute of Technology. If stores could automatically store and retrieve the price of each item, it would speed customers through checkout lines and simplify running the store. He quit his job to develop ideas for coding products. 
   
To represent information visually, he realized he would need a code.  One day, while sitting on a beach, he started to think about Morse Code which he learned as a Boy Scout.  Morse Code is a method of sending messages by using dots and dashes to represent the alphabet and numbers.  Norman Joseph Woodland began running his fingers through the sand when an idea came to him.  
“I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason — I didn’t know — I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. I said: ‘Golly! Now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes.”
Along with electrical engineer Bernard Silver, Woodland applied in 1949 for a patent for bar code technology which favored a circular design; it was granted in 1952. While awaiting the patent approval, Woodland and Silver built the first actual bar code reader. This prototype was as big as a desk and worked but its 500-watt bulb made the paper too hot and smoky. Unfortunately, their invention was too big and wasted too much heat to be practicable. Its time had not yet arrived.
   
By the 1970s, companies were experimenting with bar codes for the grocery industry.  With Norman Joseph Woodland’s help, the Universal Product Code, as it is known today, was born.  The next time you visit the supermarket, notice how just about every item sold in the store has a universal product code (UPC) thanks to N. Joseph Woodland!