The barcode began as Morse code drawn in beach sand.
In the late 1940s, Norman Woodland, trying to solve a supermarket's checkout problem, drew Morse code in the sand on a Florida beach and stretched its dots and dashes into thin and thick lines. The patent came in 1952. The first product scanned commercially, in 1974, was a pack of chewing gum.
In 1948 Bernard Silver, a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, overheard the head of a local food chain asking a dean for a way to read product information automatically at checkout. He told his friend Norman Joseph Woodland. Their first attempt used ultraviolet ink, which faded and was expensive. Woodland moved into his father's apartment in Florida to keep working, and found his idea on the beach: 'I just extended the dots and dashes downwards and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them.'
Their 1949 patent application described both straight lines and a circular 'bull's-eye' pattern, and it was granted in 1952. But reading it cheaply was beyond the technology of the day. IBM, where Woodland went to work, studied it and offered to buy the patent; the offer was declined, and the patent later passed to Philco and then RCA. Meanwhile American railways adopted coloured-stripe codes on freight cars, a scheme that eventually failed.
Supermarkets finally made it happen. In 1972 RCA tested its bull's-eye code in a Kroger store in Cincinnati, but smeared ink often made it unreadable. A linear code coped better: printers smeared along the bars, which simply made them taller. On 3 April 1973 the industry chose IBM's Universal Product Code, based on a design by George Laurer. On 26 June 1974, at Marsh's Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a ten-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum became the first product scanned commercially.
Success was not instant. A store saved nothing until most of its products carried codes, but manufacturers had little reason to print codes until stores had scanners, and in 1976 Business Week ran a story called 'The Supermarket Scanner That Failed'. Once enough players moved together, the barcode became almost universal at checkouts and spread to books, parcels and far beyond.
Source: Wikipedia — Barcode · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
