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Author: RickHendershot | Total views: 40 Comments: 0
Word Count: 975 Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2008 9:18 AM

The Fascinating Early History of Barcodes

Last night when you rushed into the supermarket for a few things, and then checked your items through the U-scan, did you consider the sophisticated equipment that was talking to you? Barcodes and scanners are so much a part of our lives the we rarely give them a second thought. Even the beeping sounds they emit are just a part of the background noise of everyday life.

Virtually everything we purchase has a barcode -- clothing, books, lumber, auto parts, even vegetables and fruit. As with so many things, we take the beep-beep-beep of commerce for granted. We forget that barcodes have only been around for the past 30 years. It makes you wonder just what lead to the development of our current system of tracing and tracking.

Back in the 1930's, punch cards were a popular way for businesses to keep track of employees. In 1932, Wallace Flint at the Harvard School of Business Administration, began developing a method to automate customer purchasing. Taking his cue from the existing punch card technology, he came up with a catalog of items, each with a corresponding punch card.

A clerk would take the card from the customer, load it into a reader, then locate the item in the warehouse. An itemized bill would be produced at the same time. Unfortunately, the country was in the middle of the Great Depression, and the project, although promising, wasn't developed.

A few years passed and one day in 1948, Bernard Silver, a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadephia, overheard a conversation. The president of a local grocery store chain was discussing the need for a system to automatically read product information during checkout. Silver mentioned this to his friend Norman Woodland, and the two began a voyage of discovery.

They first came up with a working system that utilized ultraviolet ink. Even though it was expensive and subject to fading, Woodland was optimistic, going so far as to quit his position at Drexel to work on the project full time. Morse code was the basis for his very first barcode.

Woodland says "I just extended the dots and dashes downwards and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them." He used a 500 watt light bulb shining through the paper onto an RCA935 photomultiplier tube from a movie projector to read the lines and spaces.

Later he figured out that the code would scan better if it were printed as a circle instead of a line. On October 20, 1949, Woodland and Silver applied for a patent for "Classifying Apparatus and Method". They described the linear and "bullseye" patterns, and the electronic and mechanical systems that would be needed to read them.

On October 7, 1952, the patent was issued. Woodland moved to IBM in 1951 and tried to sell them the idea. IBM eventually commissioned a report, concluding it was interesting and feasible, but that it would be a while before the appropriate equipment could be developed. In 1952 Philco purchased the patent and later sold it to RCA.

In 1959, David Collins began work at Sylvania, developing a system to identify train cars that used blue and yellow reflective stripes. The Boston and Maine Railroad tested this on their gravel cars in 1961. Then in 1967, the Association of American Railroads began installing it, but due to the economic downturn it took until 1974 to get 95 percent of the cars completed. The system was abandoned, and in the 1980s a similar system based on radio tags was introduced.

A toll bridge in New Jersey, the U.S. Post Office, and KalKan dog food all asked the Sylvania team to develop a simpler and cheaper version. It was then that the grocery industry became interested. At this point Collins had left Sylvania and had created his own company, Computer Identics, which started working with helium neon lasers. They developed a system which used a mirror to locate the bar code. It could even read ripped codes. In 1969, General Motors in Michigan and a distribution center in Carsbad, New Jersey were the first to use this system to track car axles and a hundred models of doors.

In 1966 the National Association of Food Chains, along with RCA who had the Woodland patent, developed the bullseye code, and the Kroger grocery chain tested it. A standardized 11-digit code was created, and now a request went out to Singer, National Cash Register, Litton Industries, RCA, Pitney-Bowes, IBM, and many others to find a way to print and read the code.

The spring of 1971 saw RCA showing off their bullseye code at a industry meeting. Crowds formed, including IBM specialists who remembered that their company still employed Woodland, the system's inventor. Soon IBM had their own encoding system. Meanwhile RCA was having problems with smeared ink which rendered their codes unreadable. But IBM's version, when printed in the direction of the stripes, was superior, since extra ink simply made the code taller.

NAFC selected the IBM UPC code on April 3, 1973, as their standard and tested it at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio. On June 26, 1974, Clyde Dawson took a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum out of his shopping basket and Sharon Buchanan scanned it at 8:01 am. History was made. That pack of gum and the receipt are on on display at the Smithsonian.

For the first couple of years the predicted savings to the retail industry were not achieved. It took a while for the bulk of retailers to switch from traditional stocking and pricing methods. Manufacturers were slow to shell out for barcode labels and the attendant hardware. But the shift began to take shape, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Barcode technology is here to stay.