Famous Inventions: Barcode

When you get an idea for an invention, it is easy to consider the challenges, risks, and possible setbacks you may encounter and become discouraged. However, there are many stories of famous inventions that involved all of those setbacks and challenges—inventions that people can’t imagine living without today. While many products are the result of coming up with an idea first, and then developing it, many other projects are inspired by moments in everyday life. Some of the most famous inventions have even been invented entirely by accident. The bar code, a staple of the retail landscape, is an example of an invention that took many years to perfect.

In 1948 Bernard Silver overheard the president of a local food chain asking one of the deans at the Drexel Institute of Technology to research a system to automatically read product information during checkout. Silver told his friend Norman Joseph Woodland about what he had heard, and the two began to work on a variety of systems. Their first system used ultraviolet ink, which was functional, but the ink faded easily and had the additional disadvantage of being expensive. Woodland left Drexel, convinced that the system could be workable with further development. He moved into his father’s Florida apartment and formed the first barcode based on the system of Morse code; he drew the design on the sand of the beach. "I just extended the dots and dashes downwards and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them,” Woodland later explained. For reading the resulting symbols, he adapted technology from optical soundtracks in movies, using a lightbulb shining through the paper onto a photomultiplier tube. He later decided that the system would work better if it were printed as a circle instead of a line, allowing it to be scanned in any direction.

On October 20, 1949, Woodland and Silver filed a patent application for the designs as well as the systems used to read the codes. The patent was issued on October 7, 1952. The patent was purchased by Philco in 1962, and later sold to RCA. Sometime after the Silver-Woodland patent, in 1959 David Collins, who had just received his Master’s degree from MIT, began to work on addressing a problem he had noticed while working for the Pennsylvania Railroad: the need to automatically identify railroad cars. He developed a system of blue and yellow reflective stripes, which attached to the side of the car, encoding a six-digit company identifier and a four-digit car number. The KarTrack system, as he called it was tested until 1967, when the Association of American Railroads selected it as a standard across the entire North American fleet. However, the rash of bankruptcies in the early 1970s slowed the rollout and the system was found to be easily fooled by dirt in certain applications. The system was eventually adapted for other applications by the U.S. Post Office and others.

In 1966 the National Association of Food Chains held a meeting where they discussed the idea of automated checkout systems. Because RCA had purchased the rights to the original Woodland patent, they attended the meeting and initiated an internal project to develop a system based on the “bullseye” version of the code. In mid-1970, the NAFC established a committee for a Uniform Grocery Product Code, which set guidelines for barcode development and created a subcommittee to standardize the approach. In 1972 RCA began an eighteen-month test of the bullseye code; the codes were printed on adhesive paper which was attached by employees at the same time as price tags. The circular design of the code had a disadvantage however; during printing, presses sometimes smear ink in the direction that the paper is running, rendering the code unreadable. IBM, which employed Woodland, had already asked him to work on an alternative. His linear code was printed in the direction of the stripes, so extra ink was not a problem. On April 3, 1973 the IBM UPC was selected as the standard. The invention did not really take off until 1980, however. The first item officially scanned by a bar code machine was a packet of chewing gum in an Ohio supermarket in 1974.

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