The History of the Barcode



Google's doodle for today is a barcode, in honor of the 57th anniversary of its invention. Nick Collins writes in The Daily Telegraph about the history of this label:

Granted to American inventors Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver three years after it was filed, patent number 2,612,994 was for a pattern of concentric circles, rather than the set of straight lines used today.

Their research began in 1948 after Mr Silver, a graduate student at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, overheard a local food chain boss asking one of the institute's deans to design a system for reading product data automatically.

Mr Silver and Mr Woodland, a fellow graduate student and teacher at Drexel, first tried using patterns of ink that glowed under ultraviolet light, but it proved too expensive and unreliable.

Mr Woodland then came up with the linear bar code, and later replaced the lines with circles so that they could be scanned from any angle. The pair patented their “bull’s eye” design the next year.


The barcode became widely used in UPC (universal price product code) format, and the first UPC-labeled item scanned by a reader was a packet of Wrigley's chewing gum at a grocery store in Troy, Ohio in 1974.

You can create your own personalized barcode with a tool in the links below.

Barcode Generator via Urlesque | History of the Barcode

Going to beat B.M. to it:

Americans are taking over the world with their barcodes! 2/3 of it in fact, which I might repeat again in the very next sentence if I can't think of somethign else to rant about! Oh! They are fat! They buy food that has bar codes on them- so they are fat because of barcodes!

/am I doing it right?
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UPC actually stands for "universal product code", as the price of an item will vary from place to place, but the code assigned to a single product will always be the same no matter where it is sold. The first digits of the UPC (usually 6) are the company code, and all the products made by that company will have the same digits at the start of each UPC. The last digits are the product code and each one will be different for each item. The last digit that is usually shown separated from the other digits and outside the bar code is the check digit which is not actually part of the UPC. Every time an item is scanned, the reader puts the UPC through some horribly complicated equation and it must match the check digit or it is rejected.

Yeesh. I've worked in retail too long. :-/
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Excellent, ByrdBrain, but you should have worked the fat in a little earlier, and how the rest of the world hates the US becuase of it.
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