That winter he was sitting on Miami Beach, dragging his fingers in the sand, when he had an idea for a series of lines of different widths that functioned like elongated versions of the dots and dashes of Morse Code"”in other words, a bar code.

Woodland died on Dec. 9, but his invention is so successful that it's almost invisible. Cereal boxes, soup cans, books and magazines all have universal product codes. Anything you buy in a supermarket or department store does, too. Companies like Amazon.com use multiple bar codes to track packages. They're so common we barely even recognize them as technology.

How did the barcode take over the world?

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Keywords: supply chain management, supply chain management IT, value chain, value chain IT, supply chain solutions, bar code scanners