Who invented the barcode reader

A search of the history turned up some apparently hare-brained schemes: in one, customers picked out punch cards that identified what they wanted to buy and presented them to a cashier, who retrieved the goods from a store. This did not survive long in the grocery business. Then there was the patent for a system in which the supermarket shopper threw everything into a basket, which was pushed under a scanner that identified each item and printed out a bill.

They soon found the Woodland and Silver patent. This was not the rectangular bar code that Woodland had first envisaged on Miami Beach but the "bull's-eye" of concentric circles he thought would be a better design.

When he and Silver worked on it, they decided the bull's-eye was the better symbol because it could be read accurately from any angle. Printing the bull's-eye bar code proved to be one of the greatest difficulties, because any imperfections would make the whole system unworkable.

A rotating turret of ballpoint pens, and a pen designed for astronauts that could write upside down, solved some of the problems. All this technical development, involving several companies commissioned by RCA, was to lead up to the first real-life test at the Kroger Kenwood Plaza store in Cincinnati.

More checkstands were installed and a comparison with other Kroger stores told an undeniable and very promising story: the bull's-eye bar code hit the target, with superior sales figures. But this was just one store in a nationwide grocery and supermarket business worth billions.

If the laser and bar code were to revolutionize the checkout counter, they would have to be near universal. The representatives of the grocery trade were charged with finding a way to introduce a Universal Product Code, a bar code of some description that would be common to all goods sold in supermarkets and imprinted by the manufacturers and retailers.

The code would carry information about the nature of the product, the company that made it, and so on. 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.

Therefore, in the supermarket anyway, UPC barcodes are not unique tracking numbers. They are essentially a part number. UPC codes can encode a maximum of 11 numeric digits 0 through 9 plus a 12th trailing checksum.

The checksum is the result of an algorithm or function applied to the other numbers and is used to ensure accuracy in scanning.

UPC supports no letters and no special characters like punctuation. This limits the range of numbers you can encode to whatever you can cram into 11 digits 0 through 99,,, These facts make UPC codes a poor choice for use in serialized, physical asset tracking systems.

Another lesson UPC teaches us is that unique, serialized ID tracking of one-way, consumable products is generally overkill. Generally speaking, you don't need to uniquely identify every box of cereal in a case or on a pallet.

Regardless of the lack of serialized asset tracking, the benefits of barcode adoption in supermarkets were enormous:.

Sadly, my independent supermarket did not adopt barcode technology. Which meant that as a cashier, it was my job to manually key in the price of every item being purchased by the customer. I learned that manual data entry is both soul-sucking and prone to human error. For this reason, at TrackAbout, we strive to eliminate manual data entry whenever possible. A discussion of the history of barcodes would not be complete without discussing this weird chapter.

In the year , U. The intent of the barcodes was to require readers to scan them in order to "learn more". This all happened before the advent of the modern smartphone. The barcodes could only be read with a device called a :CueCat. Yes, that's a leading colon and yes, the device looks like a cat, and yes, they probably thought it was clever that a cat would be plugged into a PC next to a mouse.

There was a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in that you couldn't read a proprietary barcode without a proprietary barcode scanner. Thus subscribers of the aforementioned publications woke up one day to find a :CueCat device in their mailbox. Radio Shack gave away, for free, thousands of the devices at its retail stores just one of many reasons it cited for its eventual bankruptcy in Full disclosure, I own a couple of :CueCats. Wired sent me one and I picked up another free from RadioShack sorry if I contributed to your demise, old friend.

I "neutered" the cats by following some instructions I found on the Internet to disable the proprietary encoders and turn them into generic barcode scanners. No actual cats were harmed in this endeavor. Now, the fun part. Imagine you're relaxing on the weekend, chilling on the sofa, reading a magazine. For the sake of argument, we're going to have to assume you only read magazines within range of a PC. What's this barcode next to this Coca-Cola ad? 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.

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You've just added this product to the cart:. When Were Barcodes Invented? Shop Barcode Scanners. Get Expert Help. Initial Uses of Barcodes 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.

First Commercial Use 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.