Barcodes
It was a significant moment in retail history when shortly after 8am on June 26, 1974 when in the Marsh Supermarket in the Ohioan town of Troy when the supermarket’s head of research and development, Clyde Dawson, pulled out a packet of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum and presented it to the cashier, Sharon Buchanan. It was the first item to be scanned bearing a Universal Product Code (UPC), aka Barcode, and proved that they could be printed successfully on so small an object.
The origins of the Barcode can be traced to Joe Woodland, who, challenged with finding a solution to improve efficiency at burgeoning supermarket checkouts, began to consider the possibilities offered by Morse Code. Along with his colleague, Bernard Silver, he took familiar dots and dashes and extended them to produce a series of broad and narrow lines which were then put into a circle, not dissimilar to a target.
The pair applied for a patent in 1949 for what they called the Bull’s-Eye and its linear version which were granted in 1952. The patent also shows a machine that Woodland and Silver had invented to read the Barcode, a powerful 500-watt incandescent bulb and an oscilloscope the size of the desk, but there is only anecdotal evidence to suggest that it was actually constructed or worked. It was not until 1967 that a Kroger Grocery Store used the Bull’s-Eye, but it proved to be of limited value because it took up a lot of space to print on a package and the round shape limited the amount of data that could be stored.
Curiously, an early experimenter with Barcode technology was British Railways, according to the December 1962 edition of Modern Railways, which revealed that they had perfected a barcode-reading system capable of correctly reading rolling stock travelling at 100 mph, From the grainy illustration, the code seemed to be in linear format.
It was not until 1973, though, that the barcode made a major leap forward. By this time an IBM engineer, George Laurer, had looked again at the possibility of storing product details on a scannable label. He was given a very specific brief: it had to be small and neat, taking up no more than 1.5 square inches, printable with the existing technology used to print standard labels, capable of storing ten digits in a format that could be readable in any direction and at speed with fewer than one in 20,000 undetected errors.
Laurer’s solution was a reimagining of the Bull’s-Eye, but instead of using a circular format, data was represented by varying the widths, spacings, and sizes of parallel lines which were capable of being read by using an optical scanner, which IBM’s research department was developing. Laurer’s one-dimensional or linear Barcode was adopted as part of the UPC, the global standard for machine-readable codes, and, unsurprisingly, IBM became one of the first suppliers of point-of-sale scanners that were needed to read the codes.
The sound of the beep of items going through a scanner would soon be a familiar sound in retail outlets.
