Photo by Sue Beyer, Lehigh Valley Express-Times

The announcement today of the induction of former IBM employee Norman Joseph Woodland into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his work on UPC bar codes reminded me of another invention that wasn't realized until years after the idea was hatched. It was the summer of 1974, after my senior year of high school, and I was on line with a buddy of mine, name of Victor, at the Uniondale Mini Cinema waiting to get in to the midnight movie -- actually, it was a "Three Stooges" marathon. The mini cinema was a wonderful place -- you could bring in those leather wine pouches that were the rage back then, and no one complained when the lights went out and sweet smoke filled the theater. But I digress. The supermarket bar code scanner had just been introduced at our local Pathmark, and we marveled at how quickly you could now check out your groceries. Victor, the declared science major, considered other applications of this technology. One that came to mind was toll booths, where drivers hardly ever had exact change, and traffic would back up to the point where it took a half-hour to travel the 16th of a mile through the toll plaza. "What they ought to do," he said (to the best of my recollection of a conversation that took place 37 years ago!), "is put these bar codes on the undercarriage of cars, and put a scanner on the ground, so the car would drive over it and then you'd get a bill in the mail." No longer would drivers be stuck behind others who fumbled for a nickel to throw in the basket, or waited as the toll taker counted out change for a $20 bill. Life in the fast lane! It was a brilliant idea! And, clearly Victor was enthralled with scanning and optics technology; he's been a practicing optometrist for going on 30 years. Yet it wasn't until almost 20 years after that night (when Vic and I also came up with the idea for music videos, but that's another story) that the first EZ Pass was scanned on the New York Thruway. Ironically, Victor has refused to this day to get an EZ Pass, saying he doesn't travel through tolls often enough to warrant having one. This, even after a camping trip not long ago when we sat in a line of cars waiting to pass through the "Cash Only" toll booth as cars with the EZ Pass zipped right by. That, I said to Vic, is a commercial for the EZ Pass if I've ever seen one. He merely shrugged. That's why we're honoring Mr. Woodland now, and not my pal Victor.