As you stand in line to check out gifts purchased in any Big Box store this Holiday Season please remember George Laurer. Had he not developed an efficient way for retailers to identify products and their prices at checkout, the lines you now face would be much longer. In fact, last-minute shopping would be a privilege available only to those who had the means to shop at stores frequented by the rich and famous--not folks with limited means like us.
Any of you who are old enough to remember what Holiday Shopping was like before Laurer's time will recall dozens of clerks standing at cash registers waiting to serve customers on normal shopping days. Often, a clerk might enter the wrong price at the register or the purchase price was different from the advertised price. This resulted in an anxious phone call to Accounting to verify the price. Meanwhile, those waiting behind you threw irate glances your way. How could you not know that the ticket price did not match the advertised price?
George Laurer, the engineer whose barcode reader transformed the entire checkout process, died on December 10, 2019 at the age of 94. He
was an electrical engineer with IBM in North Carolina's Research
Triangle Park in the early 1970s, when he spearheaded the development of
the Universal Product Code, or barcode for a group of grocery stores. It utilized a patent submitted by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver in 1949 for a code patterned on
concentric circles that looked like a bull's eye. The patent was issued
in 1952. Silver died in 1963.
Woodland
joined IBM in 1951 hoping to develop the bar code, but the technology
wasn't accepted for more than two decades until lasers made it possible
to read the code efficiently without error.
Woodland moved to Raleigh in the early 1970's to join a team at IBM's Research
Triangle Park, N.C., facility. The team, headed by Laurer, developed a bar-code-reading
laser scanner system in response to demand from grocers' desires to
automate and speed checkout while also cutting handling and inventory
management costs.
Woodland and Bernard Silver were students at what is now called Drexel
University in Philadelphia when Silver overheard a grocery-store
executive asking an engineering school dean to channel students into
research on how product information could be captured at checkout.
Since he already had earned his mechanical engineering
degree, Woodland dropped out of graduate school to work on the bar code
idea. The only code he knew was the Morse Code
he'd learned in the Boy Scouts. One day, he drew
Morse dots and dashes in the sand as he sat on the beach and absent-mindedly left
his finger marks in the sand where they traced a series of parallel lines.
It was a moment of inspiration. Instead of dots and dashes he would use thick and thin bars.
According to GS1 US, the
American affiliate of the global standard-setting UPC body, IBM promoted his rectangular barcode that led to a
standard for universal product code technology. The first product sold
using a UPC scan was a 67-cent package of Wrigley's chewing gum at a
supermarket in Troy, Ohio, in June 1974. The value hidden in that one transaction has since mushroomed into 5 billion products worldwide every day.
