History of Barcode Printing

The History of Barcodes

The beginnings of barcoding

In 1948 the ideas for Barcodes were sparked after overhearing a president of a food chain pleading with one of the deans at Philadelphia's Drexel Institute of Technology to undertake research on capturing product information automatically at checkout. Bernard Silver and his friend Norman Joseph Woodland took up the challenge.

The first idea was to use patterns of ink that would glow under ultraviolet light. The prototype worked, but they encountered problems. Several months later the idea of the linear bar code was derived, using elements from two established technologies: movie soundtracks and Morse code. Woodland decided to replace his wide and narrow vertical lines with concentric circles, the “bull's eye code” and took his idea back to Drexel where they filed a patent application on October 20, 1949.

The history behind the barcode and reader

In 1952 Woodland and Silver set out to build the first actual bar code reader. The device was the size of a desk and had to be wrapped in black oilcloth to keep out ambient light.  It relied on two key elements; a five-hundred-watt incandescent bulb as the light source and an RCA 935 photo-multiplier tube, designed for movie sound systems, as the reader. Woodland hooked the RCA 935 tube up to an oscilloscope.  Then he moved a piece of paper marked with lines across a thin beam emanating from the light source. As the paper moved, the signal on the oscilloscope jumped. A device that could electronically read printed material had been invented.

In October 1952 their patent was granted but the technology to create an affordable solution was a long way off. In the late 1960s lasers were just becoming affordable.  A milli-watt helium-neon laser beam could easily match the job done by Woodland's unwieldy five-hundred-watt bulb. A thin light moving over a bar code would be absorbed by the black stripes and reflected by the white ones, giving scanner sensors a clear on/off signal.

Barcoding to transform the retail industry

Two technological developments of the 1960s finally made scanners simple and affordable enough. Cheap lasers were one. The other was integrated circuit. 

In mid-1970, an industry consortium established an ad hoc committee to look into bar codes. The committee set guidelines for barcode development and created a symbol selection subcommittee to help standardise the approach.At the heart of the guidelines were a few basic principles. To make life easier for the cashier, not harder, bar codes would have to be readable from almost any angle and at a wide range of distances. Because they would be reproduced by the millions, the labels would have to be cheap and easy to print. And to be affordable, automated checkout systems would have to pay for themselves in two and a half years. This last goal turned out to be quite plausible. A 1970 study by McKinley & Company predicted that the industry would save $150 million a year by adopting the systems.

RCA develop the Bulls Eye Code

In the spring of 1971 RCA demonstrated a bull's eye bar code system at a grocery industry meeting. Visitors got a round piece of tin and if the code on top contained the right number, they won a prize. IBM executives at that meeting noticed the crowds RCA was drawing and worried that they were losing out on a huge potential market. Then Alec Jabionover, a marketing specialist at IBM, remembered that his company had the bar code's inventor on staff. Woodland - whose patent had expired in 1969 - was transferred to IBM's facilities in North Carolina, where he played a prominent role in developing the most popular and important version of the technology: the Universal Product Code (UPC).

IBM's UPC (Universal Product Code) makes for standardisation

The adoption of the Universal Product Code, on April 3, 1973, transformed bar codes from a technological curiosity into a business juggernaut. Standardisation made it worth the expense for manufacturers to put the symbol on their packages and for printers to develop the new types of ink, plates, and other technology to reproduce the code with the exact tolerances it requires. Each of the nation's tens of thousands of grocery outlets would have to spend at least $200,000 on new equipment. Chains would have to install new data processing centres and retrain their employees. Manufacturers would potentially spend $200 million a year on the labels. Yet tests showed that the system would pay for itself in a few years. On June 26, 1974 a single pack of chewing gum became the first retail product sold with the help of a barcode and scanner.

Woodland never got rich from bar codes, though he was awarded the 1992 National Medal of Technology by President Bush. 

History of Barcodes extracts taken from an article By Tony Seideman. This article appeared in American Heritage of Invention and Technology a Forbes Publication.

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