Co-Inventor Of The Barcode Passed Away. Without Him Records Storage Wouldn't Be The Same.

Norman Joseph Woodland, the Co-inventor of the barcode passed away on Sunday the 9th. Without his invention the records storage industry would be nowhere near as efficient and affordable as it is today. Every day we scan hundreds of barcodes on records storage boxes to insert and remove your document containers from our inventory. Without the barcodes it would take minutes instead of seconds to locate the files and boxes our clients request.

Barcodes in Records Storage

Woodland was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey on September 6, 1921. He earned his degree in mechanical engineering from Drexel University in 1947.

While at the beach, Woodland considered the problem of how to capture product information automatically at grocery checkout, recalling how with Morse code dots and dashes are used to send information electronically, he started to draw dots and dashes in the sand similar to the shapes used in Morse code. He pulled the dots and dashes downward with his fingers and produced thin lines from the dots and thick lines from the dashes, he came up with the concept of a two-dimensional, linear Morse code, and after sharing it with Bernard Silver, they applied for a patent on October 20, 1949, receiving U.S. Patent 2,612,994 ("Classifying Apparatus and Method") on October 7, 1952.

Woodland was employed by IBM in 1951, and although Woodland and Silver wanted IBM to develop the technology, it wasn't commercially feasible, so they sold the patent to Philco in 1952 for only $15,000. The first item scanned was a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum in an Ohio supermarket in 1974. Barcodes are now used everywhere, from grocery stores, to blood banks, airline luggage, and most importantly to us, they are used within the records storage industry.
 
When a warehouse holds millions of records storage boxes there must be a quick, efficient way to find them. In the past, before barcoding, companies used paper and pencil and a lot of man hours to shelve and locate records. Now, thanks to Woodland’s invention, the technology has reduced the time spent searching for records from the numerous hours it would take into seconds. The sophisticated barcode tracking system we use makes it easy to find your records.

At Cityside Archives each item and records container for storage receives a unique barcode. Each shelf position also has a barcode. When we place the box on the shelf we scan both barcodes, telling our inventory system exactly where that file and box are located.

To learn more about Cityside Archive’s barcode system or to request a quote for document management and records storage check out our website at www.citysidearchives.com.