Barcode. History of invention and production

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HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY, OBJECTS AROUND US
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Barcode. History of invention and production

The history of technology, technology, objects around us

Directory / The history of technology, technology, objects around us

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Bar code (barcode) - graphic information applied to the surface, marking or packaging of products, representing the possibility of reading it by technical means - a sequence of black and white stripes or other geometric shapes.

Linear and two-dimensional barcodes are used.

Linear (stripe codes) are barcodes that can be read in one direction (horizontally).

Barcode
Linear barcode

Two-dimensional symbologies have been developed to encode a large amount of information. The decoding of such a code is carried out in two dimensions (horizontally and vertically).

Barcode
XNUMXD barcode

There have been many inventions throughout history that have revolutionized the retail industry, from money itself to cash registers, shopping carts and the modern credit system. But, probably, nothing has changed the face of modern trade (and not only) as much as one very simple thing: a label with printed black and white stripes - a barcode.

With the development of mass production and retail trade, the range of goods produced and sold also increased. Already in the middle of the XNUMXth century, tens of thousands of items could be counted in large supermarkets, and it took a very long time to manually label and record them.

The first step was taken in 1948. Bernard Silver, a graduate student at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, overheard a conversation in the hallway between a dean and a retail chain director complaining about the lack of automation at the checkout. The problem captured Silver, and together with his friend Norman Woodland, a student at the same institute, they began to search for a solution.

After trying several ideas, including printing labels with fluorescent inks (which smudged, were expensive and also quickly "faded"), as well as labeling products using Braille, the inventors, after several months of work, decided to settle on Morse code. Woodland suggested only stretching the dots and dashes into stripes to reduce the likelihood of reading errors, and in order to be able to read the code from any direction, the strip was transformed into a system of concentric circles. For reading, it was planned to use an optical system, which was used when scoring the soundtrack of the film.

In 1952, the inventors created the first table-sized "scanner" wrapped in heavy oilcloth to prevent stray light, using an RCA 935 photomultiplier from a movie projector as a sensor. Having connected an oscilloscope to the scanner and passing a label with a code past the sensor, the inventors saw an alternation of bursts on the screen.

The paper with the code, under the influence of heat generated by a powerful 500-watt incandescent lamp, began to smolder, but it was still a success. True, it was impossible to apply the system in trade in 1952. The invention of Silver and Woodland was ahead of its time by a decade and a half. Only in the late 1960s, thanks to the advent of computers and lasers, it became possible to reduce the price and size of scanners to reasonable limits.

In 1971, RCA, which bought the patent from the inventors, demonstrated the innovation at a retail trade conference by running a lottery with tokens marked with codes in concentric circles. However, they soon switched to linear barcodes, which were insensitive to ink smearing in the paper feed direction, and in 1972 a single format for such codes, the Universal Product Code (UPC), was already developed. And on June 26, 1974, a box of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum was first identified and sold using a barcode at the Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio. But she never had a chance to be used for its intended purpose - now this package occupies one of the places of honor in the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

Author: S.Apresov

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