It’s hard to imagine doing grocery shopping without the help
of the bar codes attached to the various items we buy. It seems like we’ve had
bar codes practically forever, but there WAS a time in most of our lives that we
didn’t.
The man who actually invented the modern bar code (technically
the Universal Product Code, or UPC) passed away earlier this month at the age
of 94.
If you really want to get technical, George Laurer didn’t originate
the concept of the bar code, but simply improved on a design created by a man
named Norman Woodland, who received a patent for a similar design way back in
1952 - but the TRUE origin of the bar code actually goes back to 1844!
After graduating from Atlantic City High School,
Woodland did military service in World War II as a technical
assistant with the Manhattan
Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Woodland went on to earn his Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering (BSME)
from Drexel
University (then called Drexel Institute
of Technology) in 1947. From 1948-1949, he worked as a lecturer in
mechanical engineering at Drexel.
In 1948, Bernard Silver, a fellow Drexel
Institute graduate student with Woodland, overheard a supermarket executive
asking the dean of engineering if the Institute could determine how to capture
product information automatically at checkout. The dean turned down the
request, but Silver was interested enough to mention the problem to Woodland.
After working on some preliminary ideas, Woodland was persuaded that they could
create a viable product.
After quitting his teaching job, he moved to Florida.
While at the beach one day, he again considered the problem. When he was in the
Boy Scouts, he learned Morse Code. He drew dots
and dashes in the sand similar to the shapes used in Morse code. (The first
telegraph, which used Morse code, was sent in 1844).
After pulling them downward with his
fingers, producing thin lines resulting from the dots and thick lines from the
dashes, he came up with the concept of a two-dimensional, linear Morse code. after
sharing it with Silver and adapting optical sound film technology,
they applied for a patent on October 20, 1949, receiving U.S. Patent
2,612,994 Classifying Apparatus and Method on
October 7, 1952, covering both linear bar code and circular bulls-eye printing designs.
In 1951, Woodward and Silver were working
for IBM. Since the company did not feel the patent was not commercially
feasible, they sold it to Philco, who later sold it to RCA. The company spent
more than a decade trying to develop commercial applications, but never
succeeded. The patent expired in 1969.
In 1971, IBM became interested again, and
transferred Woodward to its facilities in North Carolina to continue to work on
the project. While there, he met another IBM employee named George Laurer.
Laurer realized that the Woodland’s pattern
was ineffective because of smearing during printing. Instead, he designed a
vertical pattern of stripes which he proposed to his superior in 1971 or 1972. This
change was accepted by IBM management and Laurer then worked with Woodland and
mathematician David Savir to develop and refine the details.These included the
addition of a check digit to provide error correction. In
1973, the IBM proposal was accepted by the Symbol Selection committee of the
Uniform Grocery Product Code Council, a consortium of grocery store companies.
The first product scanned with a bar code was a
package of gum in an Ohio supermarket in Ohio. Today, UPC barcodes are being scanned more than 6 billion times each
day – and all because a young guy drew some figures in the sand at a beach
in Florida.
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