[1] After graduating from Atlantic City High School, Woodland did military service in World War II as a technical assistant with the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Woodland took some stock market earnings, quit his teaching job and moved to his grandfather's Florida apartment.

While at the beach, Woodland again considered the problem, recalling, from his Boy Scout training, how Morse code dots and dashes are used to send information electronically.

After pulling them downward with his fingers, producing thin lines resulting from the dots and thick lines from the dashes, he came up with the concept of a two-dimensional, linear Morse code, and after sharing it with Silver and adapting optical sound film technology, they applied for a patent on October 20, 1949, receiving U.S. patent 2,612,994 Classifying Apparatus and Method on October 7, 1952, covering both linear barcode and circular bulls-eye printing designs.

After RCA interested the National Association of Food Chains in 1969 in the idea, and they formed the U.S. Supermarket Ad Hoc Committee on a Uniform Grocery Product Code, rival IBM became involved in 1971, finding out about Woodland's work and transferring him to their North Carolina facilities, where he played a key role in developing the most important version of the technology, the Universal Product Code (UPC), beating RCA in a competition.