Bernard Silver
Bernard Silver was an American electrical engineer who, as a Drexel graduate student, co-invented the barcode with Norman Joseph Woodland and shared US patent 2,612,994, granted in 1952.
What they did and why it matters
Silver started the project that led to the barcode, the technology that now confirms almost every movement of inventory in a warehouse. After overhearing a grocery executive ask Drexel to find a way to capture product data automatically at checkout, he recruited Woodland, and the two filed their patent in 1949. Silver died in 1963, more than a decade before the first commercial UPC scan in 1974. Every receiving scan, pick confirmation, and shipping label check in a modern fulfillment center traces back to the problem he set out to solve.