Who Invented Barcode? Check the First Item to Have a Barcode

The barcode, a technology crucial in contemporary business and logistics, was developed by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver in the late 1940s. Their groundbreaking work radically revolutionized product tracking and sale worldwide, resulting in staggering levels of efficiency improvement in inventory control, retail, and supply chains.

Early Inspiration and Development

The adventure started in 1948, when Bernard Silver, a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology, listened to the plea of a supermarket executive for an automated way to read product information quickly at the checkout. Silver discussed the challenge with classmate Norman Joseph Woodland. 

Woodland took the concept of dots and dashes from Morse code and stretched it into lines literally sketching them out in sand on a Florida beach. Their first prototypes utilized ultraviolet ink, but practical limitations returned them to working on more stable, machine-readable systems based on lines of different widths.

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Barcode Patent and Technical Milestones

Woodland and Silver submitted a patent application for their "Classifying Apparatus and Method" on October 20, 1949. Both linear barcodes and a round "bullseye" symbol that could be read from any angle were featured in their designs. 

The patent was granted in 1952 (U.S. Patent 2,612,994). Woodland went to work for IBM and further developed the technology, but because of the limited computational power and sluggish commercial interest, the technology did not receive instant adoption. Both Philco and then RCA eventually purchased the patent, continuing to develop barcode uses during the 1960s.

First Item to Have a Barcode

The idea came into practical use in the 1970s when the grocery industry needed a standardized system to facilitate faster checkout and inventory processes. IBM's George Laurer extended the initial invention by Woodland to create the Universal Product Code (UPC) the rectangular-style barcode that today is used on virtually every retail product. On June 26, 1974, the first retail item a pack of Wrigley's chewing gum was scanned at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, marking the barcode's commercial success.

Today, billions of bar codes are read every day, allowing the up-tempo, networked markets that characterize our world.

The pioneering effort of Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver set the stage for a data capture revolution, improved efficiency, and world trade showing how persistence and imaginative thinking can bring about technologies with enduring, global relevance.

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