Interesting Snippets from 2012-12-14

• N. Joseph Woodland, Inventor of the Bar Code, Dies at 91 - NYTimes.com

  Mr. Woodland was a graduate student when he and a classmate, Bernard Silver, created a technology, based on a printed series of wide and narrow striations, that encoded consumer-product information for optical scanning.

  Their idea, developed in the late 1940s and patented 60 years ago this fall, turned out to be ahead of its time, and the two men together made only $15,000 from it. But the curious round symbol they devised would ultimately give rise to the universal product code, or U.P.C., as the staggeringly prevalent rectangular bar code (it graces tens of millions of different items) is officially known.

  The bar code would never have developed as it did without a chain of events noteworthy even in the annals of invention etiology:

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