Modern bar code began in 1948 and was developed by two graduate
students, Bernard Silver and Joseph Woodland at Drexel Institute
of Technology in Philadelphia. Silver and Wood began developing
the bar code system for a local food chain that wanted to develop
a system to automatically read product information during checkout.
Woodland's first idea was to use ultraviolet light sensitive ink.
The team built a working prototype but decided that the system was
too unstable and expansive. They went back to the drawing board.
On October 20, 1949, Woodland and Silver filed a patent application
for the "Classifying Apparatus and Method", describing their invention
as "article classification...through the medium of identifying patterns"
and were issued the first bar code patent (US Patent #2,612,994)
on October 7, 1952.
Bar
code was first used commercially in 1966 and in 1970 an industry
standard was set by Logicon, Inc. , the writers of the Universal
Grocery Products Identification Code (UGPIC). That same year (1970)
the first company to produce bar code equipment for retail trade
use (using UGPIC) was an American company, Monarch Marking, and
for industrial use, the British company Plessey Telecommunications.
George J. Lauer followed the lead of Logicon and in 1973 invented
the U.P.C. symbol set (Universal Product Code), which is still used
in the USA. In June of 1974, the first U.P.C. scanner was installed
at a Marsh's supermarket in Troy, Ohio. On June 26, 1974 the first
product scanned at the check-out with a bar code was Wrigley's gum.
Today, Bar Coding is a fast growing industry that is revolutionizing
Point of Sale (POS) and the way people collect, store and retrieve
data. Whether at the supermarket, a hospital lab or the loading
docks, bar codes are an integral part of the data collection process.
Bar
Code History
Bar
code was first used commercially in 1966 and in 1970 an industry
standard was set by Logicon, Inc. , the writers of the Universal
Grocery Products Identification Code (UGPIC). That same year (1970)
the first company to produce bar code equipment for retail trade
use (using UGPIC) was an American company, Monarch Marking, and
for industrial use, the British company Plessey Telecommunications.
George J. Lauer followed the lead of Logicon and in 1973 invented
the U.P.C. symbol set (Universal Product Code), which is still used
in the USA. In June of 1974, the first U.P.C. scanner was installed
at a Marsh's supermarket in Troy, Ohio. On June 26, 1974 the first
product scanned at the check-out with a bar code was Wrigley's gum.