George Laurer

Laurer was born on September 23, 1925, in Manhattan, and raised in New Jersey and Baltimore. He was a tinkerer from early on, whether that meant experimenting with radios and model planes or building wooden outrigger boats from fruit baskets to sail in the local park. He survived polio as a teen, only to be drafted in 11th grade to serve in World War II. After being discharged, Laurer attended a radio and TV repair school, but an instructor encouraged him to get his GED and go to college. He graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in electrical engineering in 1951. Confronted with a tight job market, he headed north to apply for positions at GE, RCA Westinghouse and “an obscure company called IBM,” after his father had seen a want ad for electrical engineers.

Laurer’s father, who held degrees in engineering and law, sold composition mallets to machine shops to get by during the Great Depression. His mother also worked, providing day care. Watching their struggles had a huge impact. “I learned that a job was something to treasure,” Laurer said.

IBM offered him USD 80 a week in the summer of 1951 for a position in Industry and Custom Systems. Without previous field or extensive factory experience, he was confounded by an initial assignment to “Write an MES to install a pin feed platen on a 101 in the field.” But he listened to colleagues and took copious notes — a process that he would lean on heavily throughout his 36-year career. It enabled him to delve into problems with circuits, diodes and test mark sensing technology, and produce 26 patents.

Laurer worked his way up the ranks, eventually becoming senior engineer in 1969 at IBM’s Research Triangle Park in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Soon after this move, Laurer was enlisted to spearhead IBM’s response to the call for a better checkout system. Company executives suggested he present a version of a design that Bernard Silver and Joseph Woodland had invented (and sold to RCA) nearly 20 years earlier, a bull’s-eye of concentric circles. But Laurer refused. “[My boss] wanted me to write something up that said the RCA proposal was the greatest thing since sex,” he recalled, “but my nature and my training would not allow me to support something I didn’t believe in.”

Laurer had identified the circular design’s fatal flaw — it could easily smudge when printed — and conceived a linear barcode with a series of vertical lines instead. He also worked with his team to develop a coding system and a prototype scanner that would allow their symbol to be small, information-dense and scannable from any direction. “I was truly playing ‘bet your job,’” he recalled. In a demonstration for IBM executives, his team had their “ace softball pitcher pitch beanbag ash trays, with symbols on the bottom, as fast as he could over the scanner.” The accuracy and speed of the scans combined for, quite literally, a winning pitch.

The Ad Hoc Committee on a Uniform Grocery Product Code approved the design pending a few tweaks. And the Universal Product Code was officially born on April 1, 1973. Consisting of 30 black bars that could be scanned by lasers in a point-of-sale system, it would enable the speedy movement of products — far faster than a human could read prices and depress cash register keys — while greatly reducing the costs of labor and human error.