Robert N. Hall’s legacy can be found at almost every checkout counter — that little red blinking laser scanner that reads bar codes on milk cartons, boxes of light bulbs, price tags dangling from a new jacket and just about everything else that can be bought in a store.

A product of his inventive labor can also be found in most kitchens nowadays: the microwave oven.

Yet for all the widespread familiarity of what Dr. Hall wrought as a remarkably ingenious physicist, his death, at 96, on Nov. 7, 2016, gained little notice. An announcement paid for by his family appeared in two upstate New York newspapers — The Times Union of Albany and The Daily Gazette of Schenectady — and General Electric, in a company publication, published a remembrance a month later. But otherwise the news of Dr. Hall’s death did not travel very far.

His daughter, Elaine Schulz, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that besides buying the newspaper notices, the family had alerted some organizations with which Dr. Hall had been connected. He died of complications of pneumonia in a hospital near his home in Schenectady, she said.

The New York Times learned of Dr. Hall’s death while editing an obituary about him that had been prepared in advance in 2012.