George Laurer

George Joseph Laurer III (1925 to 2019) was an American engineer who spent 36 years at IBM and developed the Universal Product Code, the barcode printed on retail products. Born in New York City, he was drafted into the army near the end of the Second World War, graduated from the engineering school of the University of Maryland in 1951 and joined IBM as a junior engineer. In 1969 he moved to the company's offices at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, where he was assigned to develop barcodes for grocery stores. He found that the circular bullseye pattern first proposed was smeared in printing, so he designed a vertical pattern of stripes and worked with Joe Woodland and the mathematician David Savir to refine it, adding a check digit for error correction. The grocery industry accepted the IBM proposal in 1973, and Laurer later received the Raleigh Inventor of the Year Award and an IBM corporate technical achievement award.