The barcode is 50 years old. On June 26, 1974, a product with a barcode was registered and sold for the first time at a checkout in a supermarket in the US. Today, codes are everywhere – even though new technologies have been available for a long time.
“There is currently no end date for the use of barcodes,” says GS1 Switzerland, the organization that generates and issues barcodes.
However, the barcode is only mandatory for three years. By the end of 2027, retailers must be able to process so-called 2D codes, such as QR codes, in addition to barcodes. These allow for significantly more information: while the barcodes on the packaging encode a 13-digit number, QR codes can represent approximately 4,000 letters or more than 7,000 digits.
The barcode will not disappear
But even if packaging with such 2D codes no longer needs to be provided with a barcode after 2027, the barcode will not disappear, a spokeswoman for the barcode organization was convinced.
One reason for this may be that barcodes are ubiquitous. They appear on products in stores, on shipping labels on packages, on patient bracelets in hospitals, and on blood samples in laboratories. The BBC described the barcode a few years ago as ‘one of the fifty most important things that have changed our global economy’.
The codes have come a long way since Wrigley’s gum was first scanned at an Ohio cash register in 1974, replacing the time-consuming typing of the price with a simple scan. Supermarket queues became shorter and inventory management became easier and more accurate.
Ten years later, in 1984, the first scanner cash registers were also used in Switzerland, according to GS1. Nowadays, the codes are scanned more than ten billion times a day, writes GS1. This corresponds to approximately 116,000 scans per second.
The invention took place long before it was marketed
The invention of the barcode goes back much further than its introduction to the market. The patent for the barcode was granted in 1952 to two Americans, Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver. As students, they heard a supermarket manager’s wish to automatically keep track of which goods have been sold at checkout. The light transmitter that could distinguish between light and dark stripes and measure the length of the beams did not yet exist.
The principle behind barcodes is simple: thick and thin bars represent different numbers, similar to how short and long tones in Morse code represent different letters. If you read the lines with a special scanner, you will get a number. The barcodes consist of a country code, a company name and an item number. The last digit of the code is a check number. The scanner sends this string to an IT system that can interpret and provide the encrypted information.
Woodland and Silver sold the patent for the codes to an electrical company in 1962 for just $15,000 (14,000 in today’s money). Silver did not live to see the triumph of the barcode. He died in 1963 in a traffic accident. As an employee of IBM, Woodland was involved in the further development of the automatic identification system for goods. He died in 2012 at the age of 91.
Source: Krone
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