Bernard Silver and Norman Woodland pioneered and were the first, in 1952, to patent what?

Question

Geoff Hunt, Jahangir Khan and Ross Norman were the only World Open Champions in the first ten years that the Championships were held, in which sport?

Answer 1

Barcodes
Woodland and Silver were not able to put the concept into operation generally, but George Laurer, an electrical engineer with IBM, developed a scanner that could read the codes digitally and Woodland (also now with IBM) concentrated on stripes rather than his alternative but hard to print bull's-eye, after which the procedure started to become commercially usable. A similar barcode was introduced into a retail context by a large chain (Sainsbury's) in the UK in 1971, and the UPC barcode developed following Woodland, Silver and Laurer's system was tested commercially (in a supermarket in the USA) in 1974.