Every purchase evokes his design of the rectangular Universal Product Code. But although it became ubiquitous, he received no royalties. By Sam Roberts George J. Laurer, whose design of the vertically ...

1974: A supermarket cashier scans a multipack of chewing gum across a bar-code scanner in Troy, Ohio. It's the first product ever checked out by Universal Product Code. Some readers may be unable to ...

On a June morning in 1974, a Marsh Supermarket cashier in Troy, Ohio, rang up a 67-cent pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum using something novel — the black and white stripes of a universal bar code. The ...

Universal Product Code apps for the iPhone let shoppers find additional information and perform price comparisons on products while inside a store. They also let allow an iPhone to serve as a front ...

WENDELL, N.C. (AP) — George J. Laurer, whose invention of the Universal Product Code at IBM transformed retail and other industries around the world, has died. He was 94. A funeral was held on Monday ...

WENDELL, N.C. — George J. Laurer, whose invention of the Universal Product Code at IBM transformed retail and other industries around the world, has died. He was 94. A funeral was held on Monday for ...

If he had followed instructions from his boss, George Laurer might never have succeeded in designing the Universal Product Code. In 1971, a supervisor at International Business Machines Corp. told the ...