Question 917

In 1948, a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, USA overheard the president of a local food chain asking one of the deans to research a system to automatically read product information. He told his friend about the request, and they started working on a variety of systems. Their first working system used ultraviolet ink, but this proved to fade and was fairly expensive.

Convinced that the system was workable with further development, the friend quit his position at Drexel, moved into his father's apartment in Florida, and continued working on the system. His next inspiration came from Morse code, and he formed this system for the first time from sand on the beach when "I just extended the dots and dashes downwards and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them."

On 20 October 1949 the 2 friends filed a patent application for "Classifying Apparatus and Method". What was invented as a result?
Answer: Bar code