Barcodes have made great advancements since their roots in the Great
Depression. It has transformed from a punch card system used to speed up
the purchasing process to the modern bar-and-space barcodes we see
today on a variety of consumer goods. Punch cards proved to be too
expensive and the idea was abandoned by their inventor. More than a
decade later, the present-day barcode took shape. With data created in
the form of a small-scale code, processing and inventory maintenance
would be proven more efficient.
Origins
Barcodes were first introduced in 1949 by Normal Joseph Woodland, a
27-year-old Drexel Institute of Technology educator and graduate
student. Drexel student, Bernard Silver, had approached Woodland with an
idea that he had overheard from the president of a food chain. He had
asked the dean of the university to conduct research on an efficient way
to automatically obtain product information at check-out. Intrigued by
the concept, Woodland brainstormed solutions. He considered Morse code
to be an ideal model for its use of dashes and dots to represent
information. One day while relaxing at the beach, Woodland began to draw
extended dashes and dots in the sand. Thin lines were created from dots
and thicker lines from dashes. From this series of symbols, the linear
barcode was created. On October 7, 1952, Woodland and his partner
received a patent for their invention. However, the barcode would not be
used for commercial purposes until fifteen years later.
Commercial Use
While barcodes are best known for their use on a variety of products,
they are also used for other business purposes. Barcodes were first
placed on the sides of railroad freight cars. As the car went past a
scanner, it could be identified. This system was not successful as some
freight cars bounced past the scanner, providing poor results. Today,
barcodes can be found in many aspects of business. Rental car businesses
often use barcodes on the car bumpers to keep track of their vehicles.
Airlines place barcodes on passenger luggage to prevent personal
belongings from becoming lost. Researchers attach individual barcodes to
bees and other living creatures to track mating and migration habits.
Barcodes can even be found on human beings. Fashion models are often
stamped with a barcode to ensure that they are well organized for shows
and fitted with the proper attire. The most widespread use of the
barcode is for consumer products. The Universal Product Code (UPC) was a
response by the U.S. grocery industry in the 1970s to the demand of an
expedient grocery checkout process.
Future
Developers of the UPC believed that there would be less than ten
thousand companies that would utilize the barcode system. Today, there
are more than one million businesses in over one hundred countries
around the world that use UPC as a method of identifying products and
consumer goods. While barcodes continue to be used in many industries,
the future of automatic identification looks to the way of radio
frequency (RFID). Small transmitters do not require a direct line to the
barcode scanner
and are not subject to degradation via exposure. Radio frequency
transmitters are also being used in many retail stores to prevent
shoplifting. They can also be found on toll roads to aid in continued
traffic speed. The use of RFID is still limited due to the cost of
silicon chips used in the transmitters. Present-day chips are an average
of five-cents per chip but would need to be less than one-cent per chip
to be considered for world-wide use. Until then, the linear bar code
continues to evolve. Soon, Composite symbologies and RSS will enable the
use of barcodes on even the smallest of objects, such as a single grape
or individual pills.
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