The guy who saved you hours of your life at the grocery store has died

Where would we be without lll ll l ll? He wasn't a household name, but Norman Joseph Woodland, who died earlier this week at age 91, helped revolutionize the way we shop. Woodland co-created the bar code, along with classmate Bernard Silver, in the 1940s. The pair were trying to invent a way that product information could be read at grocery store checkouts. Remarkably, the idea for the bar code came when Woodland was sitting on a Florida beach, and drew four lines into the sand with his fingers. The system was patented in the US in 1952, later sold for just $15,000, with a packet of chewing gum being the first item to be formally scanned in an Ohio supermarket in 1974. [Source]

Click to see more on msnNOW.com, updated 24 hours a day.