An American hero: Bar code developer dies

George Laurer, developer of the bar code, is Dead at 94:

George J. Laurer, whose design of the vertically striped bar code sped supermarket checkout lines, parcel deliveries and assembly lines and even transformed human beings, including airline passengers and hospital patients, into traceable inventory items, died on Dec. 5 at his home in Wendell, N.C., near Raleigh. He was 94...

The Universal Product Code made its official debut in 1974, when a scanner registered 67 cents for a 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio. (One of the original scanners is at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History; the package of gum was bought and retained by a Marsh executive.)

“It was cheap, and it was needed,” Mr. Laurer told The New York Times in 2009. “And it is reliable.”

And it revolutionized commerce...

The bar code increased the speed of checkout lines by some 40 percent, eliminated labor-intensive placement of price tags on every product, and resulted in fewer register errors and more efficient inventory controls...(emphasis added)

The code even made a cameo appearance in presidential politics and became lodged in urban legend.

During the 1992 primary campaign, it was widely reported, in The New York Times and elsewhere, that President George Bush was so out of touch with average Americans that he was baffled by a supermarket bar code scanner he encountered at a grocers’ convention...