Read on to find out how a fraught beginning and later triumph changed inventory and asset management entirely, ultimately reverberating to every corner of society. Our story starts in when the president of a local Philadelphia food chain walked into a university. A graduate student named Barnard Silver overheard their exchange, and recruited Norman Joseph Woodland, who had experience working on inventions, to explore the possibilities together.
The crucial missing link was a method for generating a light bright enough to read the code. Rendered useless, the patent languished for nearly 20 years. The booming supermarket industry strengthened the demand for automated checkout functionality. Although several electronics companies vied for the contract, RCA, a major electronics company of the day, took the early lead. They quickly produced a working prototype of the bullseye barcode, which first appeared in a Kroger checkout in However, 18 months of testing found their design wanting.
Once smudged, the barcode was useless. To top things off, the meeting that garnered excitement also gained the attention of a rival company — IBM. Late to the game, IBM was, perhaps for the last time in history, the underdog. They did have a secret weapon — Norman Joseph Woodland himself. Laurer demonstrated his version of the barcode for his initially skeptical bosses by pitching labeled products as fast as possible over a prototype scanner, which read the products successfully.
On April 1, a winner was announced. IBM was victorious. While barcode technology came into being and was first adopted in grocery stores, barcodes are now widely used in many different industries throughout the world. Wherever they are used, their benefits quickly compound — increasing profits, reducing losses and even saving lives. Most inventories were done infrequently, on average of once per month. Some owners considered using the punch-card technology that was developed in the late 19th century to complete the US Census.
The vision was that the customer would punch the cards to mark their selections, the cards would be put in a reader at check-out, and a sales tally by product would be kept for the re-ordering process. We can trace the idea of the modern barcode to around , when a graduate student at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia heard a conversation between one of the faculty and an executive of a food store chain.
The executive was trying to convince the faculty member to have the school develop a system to quickly and accurately capture product data at the check-out counter. The problem intrigued Woodland, and for the next 2 years he would experiment with a variety of data collection techniques to find the one that worked.
Woodland wrote out the dots and dash representation of the product number and extended the lines of each vertically creating the first linear barcode.
To read the barcode, Woodland adapted the DeForest movie sound system from 20 years earlier that used a sensitive tube to detect the projector light shining through the side of the film. In the movie industry, the light detected would be converted into sound. In order to make the code readable from any direction, Woodland converted the lines into a circle — appearing like an archery target.
Convinced of the viability of their ideas, Silver and Woodland applied to patent the idea in late Taking a job at IBM, Woodland built a prototype reader in his house using the technology of the day which included a high wattage incandescent bulb. As big as a large trunk, it demonstrated that the technology could work.
Woodland approached his bosses at IBM to develop the technology, who offered to buy the patent that was granted in , but Woodland and Silver held out to get a price that more closely reflected the potential of the technology. Of note is a railway car tracking system developed by David Collins of the Sylvania Corporation. The system used a series of colored stripes made of reflective materials that represented a digit number. A Sylvania computer interpreted and displayed the data to the operators.
Strapped for cash with the proliferation of the automobile, the industry underwent a shake-up in the recession of , and the system died when the interstate truck replaced the supremacy of the train as the major freight mover in the country. In the end, seven companies, all of them based in the United States, submitted systems to the Symbol Committee, a technical offshoot of the Ad Hoc Committee. RCA, having demonstrated to the committee its system in Cincinnati, took the view, not unreasonably, that it was the only real contender.
It had no technology at all to demonstrate to the committee, and the decision to enter the competition appears to have been an afterthought, despite the fact that it had in its employ none other than Joe Woodland. That fell to George Laurer, who, in his own view, had an advantage over his rivals because neither he nor IBM had given supermarket checkout systems or bar codes much thought and his company had no ready-made technology.
Laurer was handed the specifications for a bar code that had been determined by the Symbol Selection Committee: it had to be small and neat, maximum 1.
Although there was skepticism in IBM, Laurer was convincing enough to be given the go-head with a rectangular bar code. Evans himself. However at the end of a flawless demonstration for Mr.
Evans, we had our ace softball pitcher pitch beanbag ash trays, with symbols on the bottom, as fast as he could over the scanner. When each one read correctly, Mr. Evans was convinced. After asking for an appraisal of the rival symbologies from scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on March 30, , in a New York hotel close to Grand Central Station, the committee met to make its final and fateful decision. For Woodland, who died in at the age of 91, it must have been a strange experience to witness the reincarnation in sophisticated form of the elongated lines of Morse Code he had drawn in the sand in There was now a modestly priced laser scanner to register with a concentrated beam of light the coded vertical lines of alternating black and blank and a microcomputer to decipher the information.
Like so many inventions, the UPC was not an immediate success. It was when the mass merchandisers adopted the UPC that it took off, Kmart being the first. In fact, bar code technology was almost made for companies like Walmart, which deal in thousands of goods that need to be catalogued and tracked. The bar code took off in the grocery and retail business in the s, and at the same time began to transform manufacturing and to appear like a rash on anything that benefited from instant identification.
In , F ortune magazine estimated that the bar code was used by 80 to 90 percent of the top companies in the United States. Though the inspiration for the bar code was the plea by supermarkets for technology that would speed up the checkout, its greatest value to business and industry is that it has provided hard, statistical evidence for what sells and what does not.
The once-dreaded "death ray" laser beam now comes in handy gun-sized scanners that instantly read and log anything from hospital drugs to newborn babies. After many years of anonymity, the man whose knowledge of Morse Code inspired the familiar black and white stripes finally got some recognition. In February , President George H. Bush was photographed at a national grocery convention looking intently at a supermarket scanner and having a go at swiping a can with a bar code over it.
The New York Times correspondent wrote this up as evidence that it was the first time Bush had seen a supermarket checkout. In other words, he was out of touch with everyday American life. His aides insisted that he was not struck by the novelty of the technology but by the fact that it could read a damaged bar code. Apocryphal or not, the story stuck and was regarded as damaging to Bush. No Sir. Reprinted with permission of Yale University Press.
Editor's Note, June 26, This story originally postulated that the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History collected the original Wrigley's gum pack and put it on display.
The Smithsonian did not collect the gum; a facsimile was once on display that told the story of the UPC scanner. Courtesy of Yale University Press Joe Woodland said himself it sounded like a fairy tale: he had gotten the inspiration for what became the bar code while sitting on Miami Beach. Eureka: How Invention Happens Tracing the long pre-history of five twentieth-century inventions which have transformed our lives, Gavin Weightman reveals a fantastic cast of scientists and inspired amateurs whose ingenuity has given us the airplane, television, bar code, personal computer, and mobile phone.
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