When was barcode invented

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But the idea had been around for quite a while. In , Wallace Flint suggested that an automated retail checkout system might be feasible. While his concept was deemed unworkable, Flint continued to support the idea of automated checkout throughout his career. In fact, Flint, who went on to become the vice-president of the association of food chains some 40 years later, was instrumental in the development of the UPC code.

Retail applications drove the early technological developments of bar coding, but industrial applications soon followed. In , a local food chain store owner approached Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia asking about research into a method of automatically reading product information during checkout. Bernard Silver, a graduate student at Drexel Institute, along with fellow graduate student Norman Joseph Woodland, teamed together to develop a solution.

Woodland first proposed using ultraviolet light sensitive ink. A working prototype was built but rejected as being too unstable and expensive. Barcoding was first used commercially in , but to make the system acceptable to the industry as a whole there would have to be some sort of industry standard.

By , Logicon Inc. The first company to produce barcode equipment for retail trade using using UGPIC was the American company Monarch Marking , and for industrial use, the British company Plessey Telecommunications During that same timeframe, a committee was formed within the grocery industry to select a standard code to be used in the industry.

The success of the system since then has spurred on the development of other coding systems. George J. Laurer is considered the inventor of U. In June of , the first U. Discover how you can deliver greater ROI on an accelerated timeline by partnering with Barcodes, Inc.

Some prices are so low that manufacturers won't allow us show them. A search of the history turned up some apparently hare-brained schemes: in one, customers picked out punch cards that identified what they wanted to buy and presented them to a cashier, who retrieved the goods from a store. This did not survive long in the grocery business.

Then there was the patent for a system in which the supermarket shopper threw everything into a basket, which was pushed under a scanner that identified each item and printed out a bill.

They soon found the Woodland and Silver patent. This was not the rectangular bar code that Woodland had first envisaged on Miami Beach but the "bull's-eye" of concentric circles he thought would be a better design. When he and Silver worked on it, they decided the bull's-eye was the better symbol because it could be read accurately from any angle.

Printing the bull's-eye bar code proved to be one of the greatest difficulties, because any imperfections would make the whole system unworkable. A rotating turret of ballpoint pens, and a pen designed for astronauts that could write upside down, solved some of the problems. All this technical development, involving several companies commissioned by RCA, was to lead up to the first real-life test at the Kroger Kenwood Plaza store in Cincinnati.

More checkstands were installed and a comparison with other Kroger stores told an undeniable and very promising story: the bull's-eye bar code hit the target, with superior sales figures.

But this was just one store in a nationwide grocery and supermarket business worth billions. If the laser and bar code were to revolutionize the checkout counter, they would have to be near universal. The representatives of the grocery trade were charged with finding a way to introduce a Universal Product Code, a bar code of some description that would be common to all goods sold in supermarkets and imprinted by the manufacturers and retailers.

The code would carry information about the nature of the product, the company that made it, and so on. In-store computers would "read" this information with scanners and introduce their own variations, which might involve special offers and reductions.

The vision was there but the difficulties in the way of its realization were daunting. Manufacturers were often resistant to the idea of a universal code. They had existing methods of identification of products, which would have to be discarded or adapted. Cardboard manufacturers worried that a printed code might spoil their product.

Canners did not want to be obliged to put bar codes on the base of cans. It took four years to arrive at a workable proposition to put to the whole industry. 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.

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.

The first barcode, with a design like a bullseye, was invented in by two Drexel University students named Norman J Woodland and Bernard Silver. They were interested in tackling the problems of the supermarket industry, which sorely needed a better method of inventory management and customer check-out. The pair received a patent in Long story short, it worked in the lab but was wildly impractical due to the limitations of the technology of the day.

The first practical implementation of a linear barcode came in the s. David J. Collins, an MIT graduate, designed the system. He had become aware of the need for tracking rail cars while working for the Pennsylvania Railroad as an undergraduate. Collins' KarTrak system used a pattern of 3M Scotchlite blue and orange strips which encoded mainly ownership details and a unique car number.

Licensed under CC BY 2. The KarTrak barcode reader was a machine the size of a refrigerator. It would activate as the train approached, shine a watt light on the cars and a sensor would interpret the reflections. The data would print out on a teletype machine, paper or magnetic tape.

In some cases, data could be recorded directly to a computer keeping in mind that computers of the day could fill a small room. All North American railroads adopted KarTrak. Yet just three short years later in , KarTrak was abandoned. Many reasons are cited such as poor read accuracy, lack of maintenance of the barcodes, the high cost of computers and a rash of railroad bankruptcies. At the height of KarTrak's success, Collins was growing increasingly frustrated at Sylvania. He couldn't convince his management to pursue other markets for his barcode technology.

He decided to quit Sylvania and co-founded Computer Identics Corporation. Computer Identics used increasingly-affordable helium-neon lasers to illuminate barcodes. The watt light bulbs used previously were wasteful and difficult due to the heat they would generate.

Barcodes could only be read in one direction. By contrast, lasers could be directed using motorized, moving mirrors which enabled scanning barcodes rapidly from a wide variety of angles. It was a major improvement in speed, accuracy and reliability. It allowed the scanner to read partially-damaged labels because the moving laser would eventually scan the undamaged areas.

This new laser-based barcode system found a happy home in a General Motors manufacturing plant in Pontiac, Michigan. It was successfully used to track the manufacture of car axles. This victory propelled the nascent technology forward and cemented Computer Identics' place in the industrial history books. Barcodes for supermarkets remained a holy grail of sorts due to the potential for huge productivity gains.

RCA had purchased the original barcode patent, but ultimately, IBM who didn't have the patent but did have Norman Woodland, the original inventor ultimately won the race with the invention of the linear UPC barcode more on UPC in the next section.

As well as being used in Healthcare, the Aztec is now popular with the transport sector and can be found on train tickets. It was also chosen by the airline industry as the standard barcode for electronic boarding passes. So if a boarding pass has been sent to your phone, it is likely to feature an Aztec code.

Many train companies from around Europe — including the UK, France, and Switzerland — use it in a similar way. But video recording only started to appear on mobile phones in the early s.

One of the first was the Nokia , which was launched in This makes it possible to replace dedicated handheld scanners with more cost-effective smartphones. In February , the U. Since then, barcodes on medication have included National Drug Codes, which are unique character ID numbers for each type of drug. This small change made identifying and distributing medication to patients much easier. Barcode technology has evolved to help healthcare providers tackle many other challenges across care environments, driving facility efficiency and superior treatment outcomes in the process.

Explore our healthcare page for more details on how barcode scanning is redefining and improving patient care. Beyond their everyday uses, barcodes have also inspired artwork, poetry, architecture and people from around the world to push their creativity.

Connect with us today for more information on barcode technology—and its many uses around the globe. You can also reach out for more specifics on how our mobile barcode scanning solution can support your unique business. Check it out: 1.