George J. Laurer

George Joseph Laurer III (1925 to 2019) was an American engineer at IBM who developed the Universal Product Code. He joined IBM in 1951 as a junior engineer, moved to Research Triangle Park in North Carolina in 1969, and stayed with the company until he retired in 1987. Tasked with creating barcodes for grocery stores, he found that the circular bullseye pattern first proposed by Joe Woodland smeared in printing, so he designed the vertical stripe pattern that became the UPC. He worked with Woodland and the mathematician David Savir to refine it, including a check digit for error detection. The IBM proposal was accepted by the grocery industry in 1973. He held patents and received IBM and local inventor awards.