Woodland’s mind bubbled with practical ideas to address everyday problems. While an undergraduate at Drexel, he developed a way to provide continuous elevator music by recording 15 simultaneous audio tracks on 35-millimeter film. (I know, I know – elevator music wouldn’t be my first choice of a problem to solve, either!) He wanted to take the idea public, but his father nixed it. Elevator music was a mob-controlled industry, claimed the elder Woodland, whose experience in 1920s “Boardwalk Empire” Atlantic City had taught him to steer clear of the mob.
Thanks to his dad (and the mob), Woodland turned his mind to a different problem, one that would revolutionize the way the world shops. In 1948, a local grocery store official came to campus to discuss a profit-draining headache in his industry: how to encode product data efficiently so that stores could keep better track of inventory. Woodland’s fellow grad student, Bernard Silver, heard the official’s plea and told Woodland about it. The pair decided to tackle the challenge together.
Fixated with trying to solve the problem, Woodland left Drexel and spent the winter mulling it over at his grandparents’ apartment in Miami Beach. Sitting in the sand one day, the old Boy Scout remembered how Morse Code used dots and dashes to convey data. “What I’m going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale,” he later recalled. “I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason — I didn’t know — I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. I said: ‘Golly! Now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes.’ ” He then “took my four fingers — they were still in the sand — and I swept them around into a full circle.”
It was a classic “Aha!” moment. Woodland had envisioned a linear Morse Code of thin and thick lines that could be used to classify and send information electronically. In 1949, he and Silver applied for a patent for what they dubbed their “Classifying Apparatus and Method,” including both a linear and a circular “bullseye” design, as well as a prototype scanner to read the code.