Go to any grocery store and pick up an item, turn it over, and you will see a barcode. We tend not to notice how pervasive barcodes have become, but it was not always that way.
Early use of barcode scanners involved labeling railroad cars. But barcodes didn’t become part of our everyday life until they were adopted by supermarkets.|But the barcode’s true commercial niche was in automating supermarket checkout systems.}
These days barcode scanners are used in every industry, organization and government agency imaginable. In 1948 Bernard Silver began research into a system that could automatically read product information. Together with Joseph Woodland, the first workable system was developed using ultraviolet ink. Modifications to this system, developed by Woodland while he was at IBM were based on Morse Code.
What Woodland and his team did was to extend the dots and dashes of the code into narrow or wide vertical lines capable of being interpreted by a reader. The lines were read by shining a high intensity light through the paper onto an RCA935 photomultiplier tube. By 1949, pioneers Woodland and Silver applied for US Patent 2,612,994 called Classifying Apparatus and Method.
In 1952 RCA purchased the patent and began to develop the system further. It wasn’t until 1961 that The Boston and Maine Railroads tested the system on gravel cars. One year before that The National Association of Food Chains met to discuss the idea of using barcodes to automate checkout lines.
Finally the Kroger chain of stores agreed to test a barcode system developed by RCA. In 1969 another company, Computer Identics installed test systems in a Michigan GM plant and a New Jersey warehousing company. These initial tests clearly showed that barcode technology had broad application to a wide range of industries and commercial applications. However, almost from the beginning the most common application of the technology was in large retail situations such as grocery stores. It helps businesses to improve trade efficiency and as a result, the economy as a whole.
The Universal Product Code (UPC) became the barcode standard in the mid 1970s. This was an 11 digit code to identify any product, and since then, industry has not been the same. Barcodes really came into their with the development of the standard 11 digit UPC. The acceptance of barcode technology was assured with these developments, and since the early 1980s it has become virtually universally used throughout business and government.
