What was the first barcode

Dawson explained later that this was not a lucky dip: he chose it because nobody had been sure that a bar code could be printed on something as small as a pack of chewing gum, and Wrigley had found a solution to the problem. Their ample reward was a place in American history. 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.

He drew it with his fingers in the sand. What he was after was a code of some sort that could be printed on groceries and scanned so that supermarket checkout queues would move more quickly and stocktaking would be simplified. That such a technology was needed was not his idea: it came from a distraught supermarket manager who had pleaded with a dean at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia to come up with some way of getting shoppers through his store more quickly.

The delays and the regular stocktaking were costing him his profits. The dean shrugged him off, but a junior postgraduate, Bernard "Bob" Silver, overheard and was intrigued. He mentioned it to Woodland, who had graduated from Drexel in Woodland was already an inventor, and he decided to take on the challenge. So confident was he that he would come up with a solution to the supermarket dilemma that Woodland left graduate school in the winter of to live in an apartment owned by his grandfather in Miami Beach.

He had cashed in some stocks to tide him over. It was in January that Woodland had his epiphany, though the brilliance of its simplicity and its far-reaching consequences for modern existence were not recognized until many years later.

It was Morse Code that gave him the idea. Woodland had learned it when he was in the Boy Scouts. As he was sitting in a beach chair and pondering the checkout dilemma, Morse came into his head:. Now I have four lines and they could be wide lines and narrow lines, instead of dots and dashes.

Now I have a better chance of finding the doggone thing. Back in Philadelphia, Woodland and Silver decided to see if they could get a working system going with the technology to hand. They first filed a patent in , which was finally granted in Although the patent illustrates the basic concept, there is only a smattering of anecdotal evidence about what Woodland and Silver actually built.

An oscilloscope was used to "read" the code; the whole thing was the size of a desk. Allegedly, it worked, up to a point.

But an objective evaluation judged it to be 20 years ahead of its time. Woodland and Silver had the right idea, but they lacked the minicomputer and, critically, a very bright light with which to "read" the black and white bar code. On July 16, , when he first saw the laser, the head of public relations at Hughes Aircraft Company of Culver City, California, Carl Byoir, declared they were in big trouble: "It looks like something a plumber made. One of their research scientists, Theodore Maiman, had made an "atomic radio light brighter than the center of the sun.

Most of the reporters were eager to learn what the laser was for, and what it could do. It was like science fiction. Maiman said the laser beam was so concentrated, so "coherent," that if it were beamed from Los Angeles to San Francisco it would spread only feet.

The tiny beam was hot and sharp enough to cut through materials. Could it be used as a weapon? That was not the intention, Maiman assured reporters. Maiman had won the race to build the very first laser, beating fierce competition from around the world.

And what was the first barcode? If you have pondered these questions while watching barcodes get scanned in the supermarket checkout — then you are in the right place.

So we can say with confidence that we know about barcodes and barcode scanning. From retail self-checkout apps to patient verification tools for healthcare, we support a wide variety of industries with high-performance barcode scanning. Barcodes are more than a useful tool for businesses and consumers.

These compact codes of data comprise a whole history on their journey from idea to ubiquity. We decided to celebrate that history by compiling a list of our favorite, little-known facts about barcodes.

In the late s, Bernard Silver and Norman Joseph Woodland began researching solutions to automatically read product information during grocery checkout after a request from the food chain Food Fair. Silver and Woodland are attributed with patenting the first ever barcode symbology seen in the featured image above , which looks just like a bullseye!

Indeed, barcodes and grocery stores share a close connection—which has extended to many other types of retailers over time.

Check out our retail page to see how modern retailers are using barcodes to reduce costs, improve efficiency and create game-changing shopping experiences for their customers. Most of us see barcodes on products, such as the food we buy, books, movies, and basically every modern consumer good. The reality is that the use of barcodes on consumer goods came far after its original intended use: the labeling of railroad cars. Today, barcodes are used to streamline tasks, identify items and create new efficiencies across a huge span of businesses.

Explore our industries page for more context on the different use cases for barcodes—and how Scandit can help you drive positive business results with them. In the summer of , a UPC code was scanned for the first time at a grocery market in Ohio. In the here and now, barcodes are used for much more than identifying items in-store. As more and more of us have made the transition to buying groceries online, barcodes have been deployed to support a range of delivery workflows, too.

Code39 barcodes are used to label goods across many industries and are often found in the automotive industry and the US Department of Defense. The barcode was developed by Intermec Corporation in It enables the use of both digits and characters, and its name originates in the fact that it could only encode 39 characters-though in its most recent version, the character set has been increased to What more can I learn about this mysterious product?

Let's find out. Get up and get over to the computer. Boot it up. This being circa, it takes a while. Log in. Dial-up to the internet year , right? Grab your :CueCat and scan the barcode you remembered to bring the magazine, didn't you? Now wait patiently for a web page to progressively load bearing the gift of additional advertising. There's so much more to learn about :CueCat over on the Wikipedia page. Trust me, it's worth it. Barcodes and other kinds of ID tags are everywhere, tracking everything that moves in novel and clever ways.

Today, barcodes are used to identify patients in hospitals, validate prescriptions, automate manufacturing processes, log into wifi networks, exchange contact information, check in airline passengers and movie-goers, check out groceries and other retail purchases, help you track your calories using smartphone apps and much, much more.

Recently, I scanned a QR code posted at a bus stop and my smartphone told me how many minutes until the next bus. Oh, and barcodes are also used to track physical assets through the supply chain, which is why I'm writing this book. There's a lot to know about barcodes, but from here on out, we're going to focus on the asset tracking space. I look forward to exploring the world of barcodes and asset tracking with you.

I hope you enjoy the journey. Wikipedia: KarTrak Barcoding. Topics: Barcodes. E-mail amtoland datacor. Get in Touch. You might still see the occasional KarTrak label on a railroad car today. Super Lasers Meet Supermarkets Barcodes for supermarkets remained a holy grail of sorts due to the potential for huge productivity gains. Regardless of the lack of serialized asset tracking, the benefits of barcode adoption in supermarkets were enormous: Scanning barcodes greatly sped up checkout, enabling the customer to finish shopping more quickly.

Faster checkout enabled the store to serve more customers using fewer employees. Barcodes improved the accuracy of the checkout process and greatly reduced theft and fraud.

A computer maintained the database that mapped UPC codes to prices. Dishonest customers who would replace price labels with those from less expensive products were thwarted.

Although in stores where they continued to use price labels in addition to barcodes, customer disputes between the label and the scanned price displayed at the register abounded. This eventually led stores to stop putting the price directly on products whenever possible. Barcodes enabled the store to monitor sales in real time by product and category.

They could generate reports of what was selling, at what rate, and what was not. It enabled faster inventory audits and reordering with handheld mobile devices. It enabled automatic coupon recognition - the computer knows what was purchased and whether the coupon which also has a barcode is valid. It enabled instant price changes by changing a row in a database. Previously, a stock worker yours truly would have to take product off the shelves, manually scrape off old price labels from hundreds of items each week, print and affix new price tags and restock the shelves.

The phrase "cat food is on sale" still sends me into cold sweats. Hundreds of dusty cans of cat food. Install the proprietary bundled software from CD that enabled the :CueCat to do something "useful" when a barcode was scanned namely, open a web page. So what exactly was going on here? The :CueCat was universally considered a failure of the highest order.