Bar Codes have not always been the part of our lives, although nobody pays attention to them anymore, these bar codes were first seen just 30 years ago. It was 1948, a local food store owner was having difficulty in keeping record of the inventory and how much he items have been purchased. He contacted Drexel Institute of Technology for a solution. Bernard Silver was studying at the institute and embarked on the project to find a way to automatically keep the record of the items that have gone out of the store. The group of students found the answer in ultraviolet rays’ sensitive ink and a scanner.
There were two formidable obstacles, one- the systems was very costly and two it was unstable. If the invention had to be at every grocery store and at every product, it must be free of these two flaws.
The patent of a workable bar code system was filed by two students Woodland and Silver. It remained under investigation for three years and patent was granted in their name on 7th October 1952. Today is the 57th anniversary of that original patent number 2,612,994 titled, “Classifying Apparatus and Method”. The Google logo has been changed to a bar code lines to commemorate the anniversary.
Still the use of the system remained elusive and it was only in 1966 that the system was adopted – albeit was abandoned soon as it was realized that there should be central mechanism controlling uniformly coded products. Logicorn in 1970 came up with Universal Grocery Products Identification Code or UGPIC. UGPIC was refined to UPC or Universal Product Code. Marsh’s superstore in Troy was the first to have installed full fledge barcode reading system.
The first product to have been bar coded, A Wrgley’s packet of chewing gums!
Invention of the Barcode
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