These boring sets of black and white lines can now be found on almost every single item bought from a shop.

At first glance, it seems hard to see how they possibly made any impact on the world, but they have fundamentally changed the way we shop.

Norman Woodland first developed an early form of the bar code in 1949 by combining ideas from movie soundtracks and Morse code to help him speed up store checkouts. They now allow stores to instantly access product details, prices and stock levels with the sweep of a laser.

With the new Fisher Scientific iPhone app you can download bar codes for your favourite items from our website and scan them for easy order entry! Watch the video »

Do you think the bar code is the best invention ever? Have your say on our Facebook page and you could win an 8GB iPod Touch!