Who invented the bar code system?
An important inventor in this area is Jerome Lemelson, who used bar code reader patents to ransom many large corporations. Biography is provided below. Jerome H. Lemelson Jerome Lemelson, known to his friends and family as “Jerry,” lived the quintessential American dream. The holder of more than 550 patents, Lemelson and his remarkably creative intellect touched almost ever facet of our every day lives. One of the century’s five most prolific inventors, Lemelson received an average of one patent a month for more than 40 yearsall on his own, without support from established research institutions or corporate research and development departments. Automated manufacturing systems and bar code readers, automatic teller machines and cordless phones, cassette players and camcorders, fax machines and personal computerseven crying baby dolls derived from Lemelson’s innovations. A universal robot that could measure, weld, rivet, transport and even inspect for quality control utilized a new techn
The first patent for bar code (US Patent #2,612,994) was issued to inventors Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver on October 7, 1952. 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. Woodland’s first idea was to use ultraviolet light sensitive ink. The team built a working prototype but decided that the system was too unstable and expensive. They went back to the drawing board. On October 20, 1949, Woodland and Silver filed a patent application for the “Classifying Apparatus and Method”, describing their invention as “article classification…through the medium of identifying patterns”. Bar code was first used commercially in 1966, but it was soon realized that ther
Wallace Flint was the first person to suggest an automated checkout system in 1932. Flint’s system was economically unfeasible, however, 40 years later, Flint, as vice-president of the National Association of Food Chains, supported the efforts which led to the Uniform Product Code (UPC). Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver are most often credited as having originally invented the barcode on October 20, 1949 by filing patent application serial number 122,416 (which became Patent Number 2,612,994). Though Woodland and Silver pioneered the concept of a symbol and a reader, it was not until 1974 that the first UPC bar code was actually used in a supermarket. George Laurer is credited as being the inventor of the modern UPC bar code system. It was 1970 when McKinsey & Co. (a consulting firm) in conjunction with UGPCC (which stood for the Uniform Grocery Product Code Council, a corporation formed by the grocery industries’ leading trade associations* ) defined a numeric format for prod
