Barcode - stripes that have conquered the whole world

Tomorrow celebrate the birthday of the barcode. On April 3, 1973, IBM offered universal bar-coding technology that spread throughout the world. Projects on individual labeling of goods appeared a few decades earlier. The path from the initial idea to the implementation took almost 40 years. The thoughts of the inventors stumble on the imperfection of technology. For many years, society did not pay attention to their works. But they still managed to change the world.

The first steps

It all started in 1932. Student Wallace Flint in his research work described the model of the supermarket of the future. According to his idea, buyers had to choose products on the trading floor, in a certain way, piercing a punched card. At the checkout, a reading device was installed that collected information from the cards, and the conveyor belt brought the selected purchases. Wallace proposed this idea to several businessmen, but in those years the American economy was at the peak of the Great Depression, and there was simply no money. The ambitious idea remained on paper.
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Morse code and sea shore

1948 Sunny Philadelphia. The dean of Drexel University communicates in his office with an old acquaintance - the owner of a supermarket chain. Friendly conversation flowed into the business. The businessman caught fire on the ideas of developing an automatic accounting system for goods and suggested that a comrade start developing it on a university basis. Bernard Silver, a graduate student at the university, walked past the office and accidentally overheard the conversation. The idea seemed to him revolutionary.

Bob decided to take up this business. He came to his friend, also a graduate student, Norman Woodland, and infected his ideas for developing an automation system. Of course, friends stuffed more than one lump. Their first achievements were incredibly far from any real incarnation. At first, innovators wanted to label products with special inks that glow with ultraviolet light. The project turned out to be expensive, and its payback was not possible. After the failure of the ideas, friends drew attention to the Morse code. It seemed to them that in the ingenious simplicity of Morsech lies the key to their mystery.



After another sleepless night, Woodland came to the ocean to meet the dawn. Thinking about the project, he painted Morse code signs in the sand - dots and dashes. The wind strengthened, and the tongues of water came closer and closer to his drawings. At one point, the water turned the dash into long vertical stripes. Soon, friends have patented their labeling system.

Norman was taken aback. This form is great for marking! But rejoice early. Without a device capable of reading characters, all this remained useless. For a whole year, they thought about the device and invented a device that remotely resembled modern barcode scanners .

First success

Two years later, Norman Woodland got a job at IBM. In his spare time, Norman continued to work on a barcode scanner. He managed to assemble a more or less suitable device.

Compact it just could not be called - in size, the scanner looked like a large desk, which also needs to be covered with dense matter when scanning. Stray light interfered with the process.

In addition, the scanner turned out quite dangerous - a powerful 500-watt lamp burned his hands and melted the label with a bar code. Hand burns did not stop the inventor. Looking at them, Norman assured himself that everything was not in vain. Over and over again, he raised the screen and continued scanning attempts. He painfully brought the mechanism to mind. And one day everything turned out. Barcode read! The photomultiplier absorbed the reflected light and displayed it on the oscilloscope in the form of a graph. But the triumph was still far ahead.

Silver and Woodland assembled a reader, invented the encoding, but there was no system capable of decrypting it. Computers then were in an embryonic stage - computers could not cope with such a task. Friends ahead of progress. Technology has grown to their ideas only in the sixties.

Redemption of the patent and oblivion

In 1952, Norman and Bernard appealed to the board of directors of IBM. They asked to buy a patent and fund research. They refused. Patent transferred to RCA company. Several years of hard and dedicated work were in vain.

As a result, the barcode idea was almost forgotten for almost twenty years ...

Second wind

Years have passed. A graduate of the Massachusetts Technical Institute, David Collins came to work at the railway company Sylvania Company. Engineers of the company assembled a computer and thought how to facilitate the workflow with it. Newcomer Collins proposed to create a system of automatic accounting of cars, which were often lost on the spreading American railways.

He invented applying markings readable by electronic devices on the compositions. The information was sent to a computer and stored in it. At any time, dispatchers could track the position of cars.

As the basis of the reader, Collins took the scheme of the lamp apparatus of Woodland and Silver. He amplified it with a new technology - laser. The device worked quickly and could even read damaged barcodes.

Further development

In 1966, a conference of network owners was held in the USA. Retailers have agreed to closely engage in research in the field of bar code markings. RCA, which owned the Silver and Woodland patents, learned of the decision of the store owners to create an optimal bar-coding system.

The company proposed a new solution - a round barcode "Bull's Eye". At the next conference, retailers RCA staged an interesting performance - businessmen were offered to play the lottery. The draw was that the guests of the congress handed out icons with a barcode. The guests approached the scanner, and if their barcode turned out to be winning, the winner received a prize - the exclusive right to deliver such bar-code systems to the US retail chains.

Recalled and leadership IBM. The company still worked Norman Woodland one of the authors of the concept of bar-coding. He was appointed the main new branch. The company has developed a technology of linear bar coding, which eventually became more common.

Unfortunately, the faithful associate of Norman Bernard Silver, who pushed him to the study, did not live to see the triumph of their offspring. He died ten years before taking a direct barcode as a global standard for product labeling.

Bar coding won

In June 1974, a cashier scanned the first commercial barcode in the world at a store in the American town of Troy, Ohio. The Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum packaging was a notable purchase. Now this pack can be seen in the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution.

Over the years, barcodes have spread around the world. They took on different forms, they can record more and more information, but one thing remains the same - bar-coding systems make our life much easier.

You come to the store, and the seller behind the cashier scans your every purchase. The read code is transferred to the computer, and among the many thousands of goods in the cash register program finds information about the very packaging of milk that you put yourself in the basket.