50 years ago today, the first barcode was scanned! It happened at a Marsh’s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, and the first product scanned was a pack of Juicy Fruit Gum. However, barcodes were first patented more than 20 years earlier.
Barcodes were invented by Joe Woodland and Bernard Silver. Silver was a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in 1948, when he overheard the president of a local grocery store asking one of the deans to research a system to read product information during checkout automatically. The dean wasn’t interested, but Silver was intrigued and mentioned it to his colleague Woodland.
Woodland was so persuaded that they could create a viable product, that he quit his job and moved to his grandfather’s Florida apartment to work on the project some more. While at the beach, Woodland was thinking about the project and recalled from his years in the Boy Scouts that Morse code was used to send information electronically. He drew dots and dashes in the sand, then pulled them downward with his fingers, making a series of lines in different thicknesses. The sparked the idea for a two-dimensional linear Morse code. They later decided the system would work better printed as a circle instead of lines, so that it could be scanned in any direction. So their original barcode patent used a series of concentric circles in the shape of a bulls-eye.
Woodland was working at IBM and wanted the company to work on developing the technology for their barcode. However, they were a little bit ahead of their time, and IBM didn’t think it was commercially feasible. So they sold the patent for $15,000 – all they’d ever make from their invention.
The first laser was built in 1960, which made it possible to scan and decode a barcode. In the late 60’s, the grocery industry started studying different approaches and testing out different barcode shapes. These included the bullseye shape, starburst patterns, fan shapes, and linear codes. The design that was chosen, and what we know today, was developed by IBM. Today’s standard barcodes are known as UPC-A and have 12 numbers. The first number is a product category (3, for example, is a health-related item). The rest of the digits correspond to a manufacturer and specific product.
The original pack of gum that was scanned along with the receipt are now at the Smithsonian Institution. And more than 6 billion barcodes are scanned every day!
Learn more here.