Barcode History

Barcodes Sweep the World
By Tony Seideman

Supermarkets are a perilous business. They must stock thousands of products in scores of brands and sizes to sell at painfully small markups. Keeping close track of them all, and maintaining inventories neither too large nor too small is critical. Yet for most of this century, as stores got bigger and the profusion on the shelves multiplied, the only way to find out what was on hand was by shutting the place down and counting every can, bag, and parcel.
This expensive and cumbersome job was usually done no more than once a month. Store managers had to base most of their decisions on hunches or crude estimates.

Long before bar codes and scanners were actually invented, grocers knew they desperately needed something like them. Punch cards, first developed for the 1890 U.S Census, seemed to offer some early hope. In 1932, a business student named Wallace Flint wrote a master's thesis in which he envisioned a supermarket where customers would perforate cards to mark their selections; at the checkout counter they would insert them into a reader, which would activate machinery to bring the purchases to them on conveyer belts. Store management would have a record of what was being bought.

The problem was, of course, that the card reading equipment of the day was bulky, utterly unwieldy, and hopelessly expensive. Even if the country had not been in the middle of the Great Depression, Flint's scheme would have been unrealistic for all but the most distant future. Still, it foreshadowed what was to come.

The first step toward today's bar codes came in 1948, when Bernard Silver, a graduate student, overheard a conversation in the halls of Philadelphia's Drexel Institute of Technology. The president of a food chain was pleading with one of the deans to undertake research on capturing product information automatically at checkout. The dean turned down the request, but Bob Silver mentioned the conversation to his friend Norman Joseph Woodland, a twenty-seven-year-old graduate student and teacher at Drexel. The problem fascinated Woodland.