In , a local food chain store owner approached Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia asking about research into a method of automatically reading product information during checkout.
Bernard Silver, a graduate student at Drexel Institute, along with fellow graduate student Norman Joseph Woodland, teamed together to develop a solution. Woodland first proposed using ultraviolet light sensitive ink. A working prototype was built but rejected as being too unstable and expensive. Barcoding was first used commercially in , but to make the system acceptable to the industry as a whole there would have to be some sort of industry standard.
By , Logicon Inc. The first company to produce barcode equipment for retail trade using using UGPIC was the American company Monarch Marking , and for industrial use, the British company Plessey Telecommunications During that same timeframe, a committee was formed within the grocery industry to select a standard code to be used in the industry.
The success of the system since then has spurred on the development of other coding systems. George J. Laurer is considered the inventor of U. In June of , the first U. Discover how you can deliver greater ROI on an accelerated timeline by partnering with Barcodes, Inc.
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They are now found on products all over the world. How the barcode changed retailing Inventor of barcode dies aged 91 Are barcodes the way to protect dementia patients? This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. In-store computers would "read" this information with scanners and introduce their own variations, which might involve special offers and reductions.
The vision was there but the difficulties in the way of its realization were daunting. Manufacturers were often resistant to the idea of a universal code. They had existing methods of identification of products, which would have to be discarded or adapted.
Cardboard manufacturers worried that a printed code might spoil their product. Canners did not want to be obliged to put bar codes on the base of cans. It took four years to arrive at a workable proposition to put to the whole industry. Tracing the long pre-history of five twentieth-century inventions which have transformed our lives, Gavin Weightman reveals a fantastic cast of scientists and inspired amateurs whose ingenuity has given us the airplane, television, bar code, personal computer, and mobile phone.
In the end, seven companies, all of them based in the United States, submitted systems to the Symbol Committee, a technical offshoot of the Ad Hoc Committee. RCA, having demonstrated to the committee its system in Cincinnati, took the view, not unreasonably, that it was the only real contender.
It had no technology at all to demonstrate to the committee, and the decision to enter the competition appears to have been an afterthought, despite the fact that it had in its employ none other than Joe Woodland.
That fell to George Laurer, who, in his own view, had an advantage over his rivals because neither he nor IBM had given supermarket checkout systems or bar codes much thought and his company had no ready-made technology. Laurer was handed the specifications for a bar code that had been determined by the Symbol Selection Committee: it had to be small and neat, maximum 1. Although there was skepticism in IBM, Laurer was convincing enough to be given the go-head with a rectangular bar code.
Evans himself. However at the end of a flawless demonstration for Mr. Evans, we had our ace softball pitcher pitch beanbag ash trays, with symbols on the bottom, as fast as he could over the scanner. When each one read correctly, Mr.
Evans was convinced. After asking for an appraisal of the rival symbologies from scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on March 30, , in a New York hotel close to Grand Central Station, the committee met to make its final and fateful decision. For Woodland, who died in at the age of 91, it must have been a strange experience to witness the reincarnation in sophisticated form of the elongated lines of Morse Code he had drawn in the sand in There was now a modestly priced laser scanner to register with a concentrated beam of light the coded vertical lines of alternating black and blank and a microcomputer to decipher the information.
Like so many inventions, the UPC was not an immediate success. It was when the mass merchandisers adopted the UPC that it took off, Kmart being the first. In fact, bar code technology was almost made for companies like Walmart, which deal in thousands of goods that need to be catalogued and tracked.
The bar code took off in the grocery and retail business in the s, and at the same time began to transform manufacturing and to appear like a rash on anything that benefited from instant identification. In , F ortune magazine estimated that the bar code was used by 80 to 90 percent of the top companies in the United States. Though the inspiration for the bar code was the plea by supermarkets for technology that would speed up the checkout, its greatest value to business and industry is that it has provided hard, statistical evidence for what sells and what does not.
The once-dreaded "death ray" laser beam now comes in handy gun-sized scanners that instantly read and log anything from hospital drugs to newborn babies. After many years of anonymity, the man whose knowledge of Morse Code inspired the familiar black and white stripes finally got some recognition. In February , President George H. Bush was photographed at a national grocery convention looking intently at a supermarket scanner and having a go at swiping a can with a bar code over it.
The New York Times correspondent wrote this up as evidence that it was the first time Bush had seen a supermarket checkout. In other words, he was out of touch with everyday American life.
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