IBM engineer developed the barcode but never received any royalties for it
George Laurer stepped out of his home in Raleigh, North Carolina, one Sunday afternoon in 1971 to consult his boss, Paul McAndrew, who lived across the street. ‘‘I didn’t do what you asked,’’ confessed Laurer, an IBM engineer.
He had been tasked with designing a circular, bullseye-shaped optical scanning code that could be printed on food labels. It needed to be compatible with the scanners that were being developed for supermarket checkouts. However, Laurer spotted a problem with printing the shape. ‘‘When you run a circle through a high-speed press, there are parts that are going to get smeared,’’ he told the New
York Times in
2013. ‘‘So I came up with my own code.’’
Laurer’s version was a pattern of vertical stripes that would be readable even if poorly printed. It became known as the universal product code (UPC), or barcode. Hearing his explanation, McAndrew told him to go ahead and prepare to deliver a presentation the next day. ‘‘There is nothing I can do about it now,’’ McAndrew told Laurer with resignation. ‘‘You make a presentation, but if it’s not accepted it’s going to be your butt, not mine.’’
Although there were modifications to Laurer’s original design, which was itself built on work by N Joseph Woodland, the concept was approved and the UPC was quickly adopted.
As barcodes appeared on groceries, Laurer started holding seminars at IBM for grocery industry representatives. ‘‘We were there to reduce their fear,’’ he said, adding that retailers were worried they would have to deal with angry customers if the scanners and barcodes did not work. ‘‘The guy from Birds Eye said, ‘My stuff always has ice on it when it goes through the checkout.’ So we put his package in the freezer and took it out and showed him how it scanned perfectly.’’
Within a decade, barcodes and scanners had brought supermarkets into the digital age, and cashiers were no longer tapping prices into tills by hand. In retirement, Laurer continued to follow the evolution of the UPC. Asked why, he replied: ‘‘Let me put it this way: what bigger impact can you have on the world than to change the way everyone shops?’’
George Joseph Laurer was born in New York City, the son of George Laurer, who during the Depression had various jobs, and his wife, Irma. The family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where he was educated at Forest Park High School.
During World War II, Laurer was drafted into the US army, but an earlier bout of polio led to his discharge. He attended a technical school to learn how to repair radios and televisions, but his instructor persuaded him to aim higher.
He was accepted to the University of
‘‘What bigger impact can you have on the world than to change the way everyone shops?’’ George Laurer
Maryland’s school of engineering, paying his expenses by installing oil burners in summer and delivering oil in winter. In his free time he ‘‘dated goodlooking women and drank beer’’, he said.
Graduating in summer 1951, he joined IBM in Endicott, New York, as a junior engineer, going on to create a ‘‘card to tape convertor’’. At one stage he was working on keyboard development, but had a run-in with his manager and was transferred to North Carolina. ‘‘There I was given the job of investigating ‘personal and item identification’,’’ Laurer said. That meant he was in the right place when IBM was invited to propose solutions for digitising grocery checkouts.
The set of thick and thin, white and black lines rapidly became one of the most successful developments in information technology. A barcode now graces nearly every product we buy and is so familiar that it has almost achieved invisibility. About five billion barcodes are scanned each day.
In 1954 Laurer married Marilyn Slocum, who had studied at a teachers’ college in Mansfield, Pennsylvania. She died in 2013 and he is survived by their four children.
Laurer, who had an amateur radio licence and a private pilot’s licence, continued to work his way up the corporate ranks of IBM until his retirement in 1987. Along the way he was granted about 25 patents. However, IBM did not patent the barcode, fearing that to do so would deter supermarkets from buying the company’s scanners. As a result, Laurer never received any royalties.
As use of the UPC proliferated, Laurer was increasingly hounded by people paranoid that inside its lines he had hidden the number 666, known as the sign of the Devil. He would patiently reply that it was simply a coincidence that the three ‘‘guard bars’’ in the code resembled the number six, just as it was a coincidence that his first, middle and last names all had six letters. ‘‘I didn’t get the meat,’’ Laurer would grumble. ‘‘But I did get the nuts.’’ – The Times