Invention of the Bar Code Revolutionizes Retail Sales and Inventory Control

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Invention of the Bar Code Revolutionizes Retail Sales and Inventory Control

Overview

While early technological developments in bar coding were stimulated by possible retail applications, the first actual bar codes appeared in industrial settings. From a 1932 Harvard University master's thesis to imprinted codes on the side of railway cars in the 1960s to today's ubiquitous Universal Product Codes printed on manufacturers' and consumer products worldwide, bar code technology evolved from a simplistic checkout scheme to widespread inventory control and data collection systems. By the end of the twentieth century, bar code technology had found numerous worldwide applications across all industries. Hundreds of thousands of manufacturer-specific identification numbers—with no telling how many product codes based on those manufacturer codes—had been assigned not just for retail and consumer goods but also in other commercial, industrial, and government sectors in countries worldwide.

Background

In 1932 a Harvard University business student named Wallace Flint wrote his master's thesis on a proposed punched card supermarket checkout scheme. Inspired by a punched card system developed for the 1890 U.S. Census, Flint envisioned a system in which consumers would make their merchandise selections by removing corresponding punched cards from a catalog and handing the cards to a checkout attendant. The checker would place each card in a reader that would, in turn, activate an elaborate conveyor belt system (in reality, an unwieldy and expensive scheme) to deliver purchases to the customer. The consumer would receive a bill that would also give store management a record of products purchased. With Flint's thesis, a method to automatically update inventory records was born, but it went unrealized due to its conception in the midst of the Great Depression.

Progress towards the modern bar code began in 1948 when Bernard Silver (1925?-1963), a graduate student at Philadelphia's Drexel Institute of Technology, overheard the head of a local food chain petitioning a Drexel dean for research into a system that could automatically capture product data during checkout. Silver mentioned the conversation to his friend and fellow Drexel graduate student Norman Joseph Woodland. The duo began experimenting with ink patterns and ultraviolet light. Their first test device experienced difficulties due to ink instability and high printing expenses, but they were determined to succeed. Eventually, Woodland's single focus on the project led to a solution.

Frustrated with tackling the invention while at Drexel, Woodland left Pennsylvania for Florida where, after several months, he devised a linear bar code using elements from two existing technologies—Morse code and the movie sound system developed in the 1920s by Lee de Forest (1873-1961). His resulting straight line pattern was quite similar to later bar codes, but Woodland replaced the wide and narrow vertical lines with concentric circles, known as the bull's eye code, before he and Silver filed a patent application for their "Classifying Apparatus and Method" in October 1949. (The patent was issued in October 1952.)

In 1951 Woodland accepted a job with International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), while still working with Silver to investigate the construction of a bar code reader to electronically read their printed codes. (A year later, they succeeded in building the first actual reader in the living room of Woodland's house in Binghamton, New York. It was crude, about the size of a desk, but it worked. Further advances in scanning technologies awaited the development of lasers and integrated circuit microchips in the late 1960s. These finally brought about the handheld scanners in use at the end of the twentieth century.) In 1961 Philco purchased Woodland and Silver's patent, which was later sold to RCA, which would not make any developments in bar code technologies until the early 1970s. Before then, advances in automatic data collection would result from research in the railroad industry.

In the late 1950s the Association of American Railroads was searching for a method to track railway cars. In response to this search, a Sylvania Corporation employee named David Jarrett Collins (1936- ) designed a reflective, color-coded bar system read by an optical scanner, which was first tested in 1961 on gravel cars in the Boston & Maine system. Rail yards were able to use the bar code readers to automatically identify cars and supply valuable accounting data to rail industry members. In 1967 Sylvania's color bar code technology was adopted as the freight car control system throughout North America (although it was abandoned in the late 1970s in the wake of the railroad bankruptcies during the mid-1970s economic recession).

Sensing the importance of bar code technology, Collins approached management at Sylvania to develop a black and white line equivalent to the railroad's system for other industries. In a move probably regretted, Sylvania refused to fund such a program, so Collins left to co-found Computer Identics Corporation in 1968. The new company immediately began experimenting with laser beams for bar code scanning. In the spring of 1969 Computer Identics installed its first two systems—the first true bar code systems in the world—in a General Motors plant in Pontiac, Michigan, and in a distribution facility operated by General Trading Company in Carlsbad, New Jersey.

While Woodland and Silver's technological vision and Computer Identics' achievement demonstrated the feasibility of bar codes in industrial settings, it was eventually the grocery industry that, like Flint in the 1930s, explored the potential of automated data systems. By 1966 RCA owned the rights to Woodland and Silver's patent and had learned that the grocery industry's members were looking into the application of bar code technology in their stores. Research was launched, and in the spring of 1971 RCA demonstrated a bull's eye bar code system at an industry meeting. IBM executives at the meeting realized they needed to pursue the fledgling technology and transferred the bar code's inventor, Woodland, an IBM staffer, to their facilities in North Carolina, where he played a prominent role in developing the most significant version of the technology, the Universal Product Code (UPC).

While IBM was working out its technically advanced UPC system, RCA continued to test its bull's eye code. In July 1972 RCA embarked on an 18-month test in a Kroger grocery store in Cincinnati, Ohio, but experienced printing problems and scanning difficulties that hampered research and development. In April 1973 the grocery industry adopted IBM's Universal Product Code system as its standard, transforming business systems worldwide as a result. On June 26, 1974, at a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a package of Wrigley's chewing gum made history, as it became the first retail product sold with the help of a scanner. The UPC label on the Wrigley's package was part of IBM's fixed-length, all-numeric system designed to uniquely identify a product and its manufacturer. In addition to eliminating the necessity of putting a price label on the package, the UPC label gave both Wrigley's and Marsh Supermarkets a mechanism to track valuable consumer information while also collecting important inventory data. The resulting database could be shared electronically to allow greater efficiencies than ever experienced in the manual systems replaced.

The success of the UPC system and refinements to its basic code led to the development of other bar coding systems. For example, the Code 39 system, adopted in 1981 by the U.S. Department of Defense for labeling all products supplied to the U.S. military, was the first alphanumeric bar code. Code 39 also found applications in the automotive industry and the health industry. The variable-length Codabar system used by overnight shipping giant Federal Express was another offshoot of bar code technology, as were the postal tracking codes developed for the U.S. Postal Service. Bar codes crept into Europe with the European Article Numbering (EAN) system, also developed at IBM, which included an extra symbol to identify country of origin. Towards the end of the twentieth century, developers migrated to a stacked bar code (also known as the two-dimensional or matrix code), which found its way onto hospital patient identification bracelets and even fingerprint data encoded on identity cards.

Impact

From grocery stores to university libraries, bar code technology found a home. Aided by rapidly developing hardware (including linear image technology introduced in 1999) and software, the advanced technological systems transformed the daily functions of society. Consumers learned to scan their own groceries in self-checkout lanes (saving hours of paid labor each week per checkout stand). Students learned to scan the labels in books and resource materials they wished to take home from the library. The products and materials scanned were cataloged in innumerable databases, with the data evaluated from all angles. Everything from consumer loyalties to customer service to component inventories would be tracked and influenced. An army of bookkeepers and data-entry typists were replaced by bar codes, bar code readers, and computers. In each instance, a more effective management of resources resulted.

Despite its humble beginnings as a retail sales tracking tool, the bar code has provided immeasurable benefits across numerous industries on its way to becoming a multi-billion dollar business. From the speed and accuracy of data input to the labor savings realized through the elimination of manual systems, the bar code has far surpassed anything its early developers could have envisioned. With the increased information available to study marketplace trends, maintain inventory control, and track personnel or even ongoing projects in a workgroup, bar code technology has found its way into untold market sectors, with far-reaching impact on every aspect of our lives. It could be the single most important invention in the history of organizing mankind. The bar code is a prime example of the technological achievements of twentieth-century society.

ANN T. MARSDEN