Wednesday, June 26 was the 50th anniversary of the first commercial scan of a barcode on a consumer product, a pack of Wrigley chewing gum. Those of us who were involved had no idea when and where that would happen, and even less could have imagined the significance of that event. Did it change the world? Absolutely. But not suddenly.
The Barcode Breakthrough
Breakthroughs like the barcode have been compared to the invention of the automobile, television, or the microcomputer. They are afforded a status that suggests they stand alone, as individual achievements, which aggregate into an inertia, a wave called progress. Often a sense of purpose and importance is assigned to these breakthroughs as if we knew from the start how they would impact the trajectory of human history.
While there is a definite pattern or movement of technological advancement with discernable, specific nodes, the bigger picture is less dramatic and more revealing.
An Invention Before Its Time
Woodward and Silver patented the original idea of a barcode in 1952 (US Patent 2,612,994) decades before the first scan event. It was intended to make grocery store inventory and checkout more efficient. While the basic idea of a barcode had merit, laser scanner technology would take another 20 years. The patent image was a bullseye shape—clever because it could be scanned at any angle, but difficult to print accurately.
Years later, in the early 1970’s, George Laurer reconfigured it as a pattern of parallel lines and spaces which became the Universal Product Code, the UPC we know today.
Almost from the beginning, skeptics predicted the demise of barcodes in favor of other technologies, the loudest voices perhaps being advocates of RFID. Yet here we are, commemorating 50 years of barcodes that have infiltrated deeply into our lives in many ways: access control and security in buildings, airline baggage tags and boarding passes, electronic medical records, and asset control. Barcodes continue to be relevant because they are robust, virtually error-free and cheap. RFID did not replace barcodes because the two technologies have different abilities and limitations, and—most importantly—they work better together than separately.
The First Scanned Barcode
My small role in the birth of the barcode was at a company in Chicago, Fotel, Incorporated, a company that produced precision photographic images, called photomasks, that were used to manufacture printed circuit boards. Precision photographic imaging was nothing new—it has been done for years to produce lithographic plates for the printing industry. It was that capability that attracted the William Wrigley Company to Fotel, to produced the film masters for UPC symbols on their products, including the product first scanned 50 years ago.
My father founded Fotel in 1963, and I had summer jobs there in high school and college. He used to brag that I was his first employee, and I would lovingly chide him that employees are people that you pay.
Happy 50th Birthday, barcode. You have become ubiquitous on a global scale. Who could have guessed–when you made it easier to buy a product that nobody really needs? Sorry Wrigley.
