From a cinema lamp to a barcode

The invention of the barcode was one of the practical inventions of technology. One-dimensional and two-dimensional barcodes are still the most common means of identification for products and services, although RFID is blowing its tail.

A barcode is a representational form of the information so that it can be read by machines. Originally, the barcodes represented the data in characters that differed according to their width and spaces of parallel lines. These barcodes are called linear barcodes or one-dimensional barcodes. They also come today in the shapes of chevrons, dots, hexagons and other geometric shapes - two-dimensional barcodes. Although the two-dimensional barcode systems use symbols rather than lines, they are still popularly called barcodes.

The first use of barcodes was to tag train cars, but this application failed commercially, until suddenly they were used in control systems in supermarkets where the computer reads the details of the item from the barcode attached to it, a task that has become almost universal. Their use has spread to other areas of data capture, such as production line control.

Today, they are trying to increase the amount of information attached to the fences through the use of radio tags (RFID), however these tags are very expensive, so their use is limited. It costs about half a cent per unit to use barcode tags compared to 7-30 cents to use RFID, so RFID is only used to mark entire surfaces and not individual boxes or items. For this reason the barcode continues to be popular.

The barcode can be read using optical scanners known as barcode readers that are scanned using dedicated software. XNUMXD barcode scanning software is found in cell phones today, a particularly common application in Japan, India and Europe.

The theoretical idea was conceived by a business administration student from Harvard, Wallace Flint, in 1932 when he wrote a thesis promoting the "automatic department store" using punched cards that the customer would give to the clerk, who would charge it to a reader, thus identifying which products were purchased. Despite the hype, punched card systems were expensive, and this being in the middle of the Great Depression, the idea never caught on.

In 1948, Bernard Silver, a doctoral student at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, received a request from the manager of a local food chain and asked to investigate the possibility of using an automatic reading system when leaving the supermarket and making the purchase. Silver told his friends Norman Joseph Waldand and Jordyn Johanson about the request and the three worked on a variety of systems, the first system used ultraviolet ink, but this ink tended to erase and was very expensive to use.

Waldand, who was convinced that such a system could be developed, left his post at Drexel and moved to Florida, where he created the first barcode from sand on the beach when "I just extended the dots and dashes down and left spaces between them. To read them he adopted the optical sound track technology in films and used 500 watt bulbs passing through paper to a tube he took from a cinema projector. He later decided that the system would work better if it was printed as a circle instead of a line which allowed him to scan it from any direction.

On October 20, 1949, he registered a patent for his invention, in which he described both the wire configuration and the circular configuration, as well as the mechanical and electronic components required to read the code. The patent was approved on October 7, 1952, but even before that, in 1951, Waldand and Janusson moved to Libm and continued to try to interest the company in the development of the system. In the end, the company issued a report on the idea, the conclusion of which was that it was practical and interesting, but required equipment that was still futuristic. In 1952 Philco purchased the patent, but sold it to RCA. In 1969 Silver was killed in a car accident.

In 1959, Daveyk Collins from MIT conducted an experiment using barcodes to identify train cars of the Pennsylvania Railroad. He developed a system that uses blue and yellow lines attached to the sides of the car, and encodes a six-digit company ID and a four-digit car number. The light reflected from the strips was fed to a photomultiplier (the device taken from the cinema projector), which was filtered into blue and green colors.

The experiment failed but a toll bridge in New Jersey was interested in the technology to scan its monthly subscriptions. And little by little, food chains also became interested in it.

At the same time, progress was made in the field of scanners when Collins founded the Computer Identics company that investigated the possibility of using helium-neon lasers instead of incandescent bulbs, and performed the scanning using a mirror from the barcode located tens of centimeters from the scanner. This greatly facilitated the process and improved its reliability, and also made it possible to handle the code that was partially damaged.

The company installed the system in 1969 at the General Motors plant in Pontiac, Michigan, and at a trading company in New Jersey. At General Motors, the system was used to differentiate between 18 types of car axles.

In 1966, the RCA company, which at the time owned Woodland's patent, began experiments with the Kroger food chain, during which the barcode was developed in the form we know it and slowly it was adopted by large stores as a standard.

In 1971, the company presented the development at a technology conference and IBM executives at the conference saw the crowding in RCA's booth and immediately began to develop their own system. IBM's marketing expert, Alec Jablonover says that the company still employed Woodland - the inventor of the system, and established a special facility in North Carolina for the purpose of development.

In the end, the cash register company NCR also joined the competition, and in fact since then the enormous penetration of the barcode into our lives began.