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Barcodes Have Revolutionized Commerce

Go to any grocery store and pick up an item, turn it over, and you will see a barcode. For the most part, we now take this technology for granted, but barcode technology has become critical in the business world.

Early use of barcode scanners involved labeling railroad cars. But barcodes didn’t become part of our everyday life until they were adopted by supermarkets.|But the barcode’s true commercial niche was in automating supermarket checkout systems.}

Now, barcode scanning is implemented by the US Post Office, The Department of Defense, and just about every industrial application you can think of. Barcodes got their start with the research initially done by Bernard Silver and Joseph Woodland in the late 1940s. While working at IBM Woodland developed a system based on extending Morse Code in a graphical manner.

What Woodland and his team did was to extend the dots and dashes of the code into narrow or wide vertical lines capable of being interpreted by a reader. The paper would then be passed in front of a photo cell and a bright light would be shone through the paper. By 1949, pioneers Woodland and Silver applied for US Patent 2,612,994 called Classifying Apparatus and Method.

In 1952 RCA purchased the patent and began to develop the system further. It wasn’t until 1961 that The Boston and Maine Railroads tested the system on gravel cars. Right around the same time the idea was being discussed by the large grocery chains in the U.S.

It was the Kroger chain who first volunteered to test the RCA system based on the bulls-eye code. And by 1969, Computer Identics; a company formed by David Collins of the Pennsylvania Railroad, installed the first two systems at General Motors in Pontiac, Michigan and The General Trading Company in Carlstadt, New Jersey. These initial tests clearly showed that barcode technology had broad application to a wide range of industries and commercial applications. But the most common use for this technology is in the grocery and retail industry. There is no doubt that barcode technology improves efficiency and cuts down on the manual labor otherwise required to keep tabs on inventory.

The Universal Product Code (UPC) became the barcode standard in the mid 1970s. This was an 11 digit code to identify any product, and since then, industry has not been the same. Barcodes really came into their with the development of the standard 11 digit UPC. By 1980, barcode scanner systems were being implemented by more than 8000 new stores per year.

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