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Q: Vote for one of Fast Company's best-of-the-best innovations, or nominate your own:
A: The bar code || The signature file || The lab mouse || The catalytic converter

The Killer App -- Bar None

What: The bar code and scanning device
When: Invented in 1949; patented in 1952; first used commercially in 1974
Where: South Beach, Miami Beach, Florida
Who: Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver

The format for the bar code came to Joe Woodland while he was at the beach in 1949. Woodland, who is now 80, had spent World War II working on the Manhattan Project. After the war, he returned to Drexel University to teach mechanical engineering. While there, a colleague of Woodland's, Bernard Silver, overheard the president of the Food Fair grocery stores appealing to a Drexel dean for help automating the process of grocery checkout. Silver and Woodland started brainstorming ideas.

Several months later, Woodland was vacationing on Miami's South Beach, pondering the problem and considering how Morse code might be used to solve it. Woodland idly stuck his fingers in the sand and pulled them toward him, raking a set of parallel lines that represented a kind of "long form" of dots and dashes. Those lines were the inspiration for the bar-code design that he and Silver ultimately patented.

The bar code is one of the killer apps of the digital economy. More than a million companies worldwide use the familiar UPC (Universal Product Code) symbols to identify consumer products. But the UPC symbol is just a subset of a much wider world of bar codes that are used for all kinds of identification and inventory control. FedEx, UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service use proprietary bar codes to move mail and parcels. NASA uses bar codes on the back of the heat-resistant tiles of its space shuttles to make sure the right tiles get in the right places. Researchers use tiny bar codes to track bees in and out of hives.

The Uniform Code Council, which issues the UPC product codes, estimates that UPC codes alone get scanned 5 billion times a day -- and UPC codes account for perhaps only half of the bar-code universe.

The equipment and software that is used to print, scan, and program bar codes is a $16-billion-a-year business. Even Woodland is amazed at how widespread the bar code has become. "Fifty years ago, we didn't even imagine all of the ways that it would be used in the grocery store."
-- Charles Fishman