Strange but true: How lines drawn in the sand at a Florida beach became the bar code

This New York Times report on the life of N. Joseph Woodland, inventor of the bar code dies, who died recently at age 91, offers a fascinating tale of the birth of the bar code. The inventor, who only made $15,000 for conceptualizing the bar code, came ...
Dec. 14, 2012

This New York Times report on the life of N. Joseph Woodland, inventor of the bar code dies, who died recently at age 91, offers a fascinating tale of the birth of the bar code. The inventor, who only made $15,000 for conceptualizing the bar code, came up with the idea because of his interest in Morse Code and a drawing he made of a series of wide-and-thin lines on a Florida beach.

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Jim Lucy Blog

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Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.