Bar Code Basics - History

Fifth Century, A.D. – In Ireland, Celtic Tribes used Ogham, an alphabet carved into wood and stone which uses horizontal or slanted lines crossing a vertical line.

1890 – Punch cards used to help tabulate the 1890 United States Census, one of the firstworking instances of data automation

1932 – Wallace Flint, a student at the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration, wrote his master’s thesis on the supermarket of the future, in which he foresaw customers using punch cards to make product selections, having the punch cards read by machine at the checkout counter, goods arriving via conveyor belt, and the data of the transaction stored and available to the management of the supermarket.

1948 – Bernard Silver, a graduate student at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, overheard a conversation in which a local store owner was talking about the need for a system to capture product information at checkout to aid in inventory control. Silver mentioned the conversation to Joseph Woodland, a 27-year old teacher at Drexel. Silver and Woodland experimented with using various inks and ultraviolet light. Later they would incorporate ideas from movie soundtrack technology and Morse Code into their ideas.

1949 – Silver and Woodland build the “bull’s eye code,” a pattern of concentric circles that could be scanned from any direction. A patent application was filed on October 20, 1949.

1952 – Woodland, now working at IBM, and Silver built the first bar code reader in the living room of Woodland’s house in Binghamton, New York. The desk-sized device used a 500-watt electric light, and had to be completely wrapped in black oilcloth to keep out ambient light. The experiment proved successful, as a printed page passed under the light caused fluctuations in an oscilloscope. However, computer technology was cost-prohibitive, and lasers had not yet been invented, preventing further experimentation and implementation in the commercial sector.

1961 – David J. Collins, an employee of the Sylvania Corporation, and the Boston & Maine Railroad experiment with a system of orange and blue reflective stripes on railroad cars that, when flashed with a colored light, were interpreted as to owner and car identity.

1967 – A nation-wide system for coding railroad cars, based on Collins’ work at Sylvania, is instituted. Collins also floats the idea for automating conveyor process to Sylvania, but is turned down for funding. Collins quits Sylvania and starts Computer Identics Corporation.

Late 1960s – Commercial lasers become affordable. Coupled with the advent of the integrated circuit, the path was opened for computerized scanning technology.

1969 – Computer Identics installs the first two true bar code systems, at General Motors and at the General Trading Company in New Jersey. Scanning system components are still built by hand. Also, RCA attends a grocery industry meeting where the need for a scanning system was stressed.

1970 – Railroads begin installing the Sylvania scanning equipment. By the mid 1970s, an economic recession hit the railroads particularly hard, and budgets for the scanning systems are curtailed. A study published in 1970 by McKinley & Company predicts that scanning systems would save the grocery industry $150 million per year.

1971 – RCA demonstrates the “bull’s eye code” system at a meeting of grocery executives. IBM, noting the crowds that RCA’s demonstrations were gathering, also began working with Woodland to resurrect their own bar code initiatives. Woodland helps develop the Universal Product Code (UPC).

1972 – RCA continues to push the “bull’s eye code,” but printing problems and scanning difficulties became roadblocks to successful implementation. Experimentation continues with other code shapes and layouts.

1973 – The Universal Product Code (UPC) is officially adopted as the standard for bar code scanning.

June 26, 1974 – The Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a single pack of chewing gum became the first retail product sold with the help of a scanner.

1978 – Less than one percent of grocery stores in the nation have scanners. By 1981, 10% of grocery stores have scanners. By 1984, 33% have scanners. Today, a majority of stores use scanners.

1992 – Woodland is awarded the National Medal of Technology by President George Bush for his work on bar codes.

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Bar Code - History