The Barcode Turns 57 (And Is Still Going Strong)

Filed under: barcode, enterprise mobility equipment, HHP, intermec, symbol, zebra, Announcements

First Barcode -- Woodland and Silver 1952

Fifty-seven years ago, on October 7, 1952, the US Patent Office issued a patent to two American inventors (Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver) for a bulls-eye shaped barcode (yes, even though their symbol was "round" - we now refer to it as the first "bar" code) and a scanning apparatus designed to interpret the bulls-eye pattern. Silver and Woodland started as grad students at the Drexel Institute of Technology (now Drexel University), to work on a problem that was brought to them by a local Philadelphia grocer who wanted a system that would "read" product information during checkout. Barcode eventually started to take off in the 70's with the adoption of the Universal Product Code standard by the grocery industry, and as we all know, the rest is history. Thus was born an extremely successful technology -- one that has found its way into applications far beyond grocery and that were not imaginable 50 or even 25 years ago.  For this paragraph, I borrowed heavily from a nice, concise arcticle by Mary Bellis on the history of barcode at about.com.

Today is good time to reflect on the genius borne of the Woodward and Silver collaboration: described in their patent applications as "article classification . . . through the medium of identifying patterns".  These young guys invented, envisioned and paved the way for easily produced (usually simply printed) patterns (that is, barcode symbols), which could be readily affixed to  just about any object that someone might want to keep track of.  They knew it would be relatively simple to read (and interpret) the barcode patterns with light emitted from a "scanner", which was reflected off the barcode pattern. Their vision has led directly to the creation of incalculable economic and societal benefits over the last 35 or 40 years.

Finally, it's been popular to speculate for the last few years about the imminent demise of the lowly and now familiar, "simple" barcode -- choose your new candidate for replacement champion from this incomplete list: two dimensional symbologies, smart cards, memory buttons, and the latest, and certainly the contest entrant which has breached the conscience of the consumer, Radio Frequency Identification or RFID.  However -- my advice is to expect the old garden variety barcode to be with us for a long time to come (and since I'm part way out on the limb, I'll just go ahead and say "for decades").  Why?  The answer is cost advantage -- barcode "marking" (that's industry jargon for the act of printing or affixing a barcode to a product or object) is cheap. For products which are packaged and sold at retail, adding a barcode is essentially "free" -- and "free" is a tough price for any competing technology to beat.  Innovations in enterprise mobile computers, (like Motorola/Symbol, Intermec, HHP) scanners, and printing technologies (Zebra, O'Neil, Datamax) continue to enhance the application opportunities for the good old barcode, and will for many years to come.