Barcodes are everywhere today, but it hasn’t actually been that way for very long. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and so it was with the barcode. Overhearing a local merchant’s request for a quick-method system to read product information at the checkout counter, graduate student Bernard Silver and his friend, Norman Woodland, started working on a number of systems. Previous attempts at developing a similar system using punch cards never caught on due to the prohibitive equipment costs and the Great Depression.
Silver had a fairly clear idea of what needed to be done and he was obsessed enough to use his own money to find a system that worked. The first system he and Woodland developed used ultraviolet ink, but it proved both too expensive and untrustworthy, as the ink faded. He later claimed that Morse code gave him the inspiration that led to his first successful barcode design. He took the Morse code dots and dashes and put them in rows.
He then used technology developed for movie soundtracks to read it, but was moved to change the box design to a bullseye so it could be read in any direction. Silver and Woodland received their first patent for the new technology in 1952. Silver started working for IBM in 1951, who was, ironically, deeply involved in punch-card technology. Silver tried to interest the corporate giant in his project, and IBM actually commissioned a report which indicated the idea was feasible, but involved technology that was simply unavailable at the time.
Early barcode scanner prototypes indicated that the technology could work. The prototype was simply too large, and the technology for reducing it in size was unavailable in the 1950s. IBM attempted to buy the patents from Silver and Woodland, but they eventually got a better offer from Philco. Unfortunately Bernard Silver died in a car crash the following year.
Meanwhile it was becoming clear that barcode scanning technology could be used by grocery stores who were trying to maintain the right amount of inventory, and railroads struggling to keep track of their many cars. The railroad industry, still very strong in those days, adopted a system similar to the barcode
The system used for rail cars was the work of David Collins working along with the Sylvania company. Collins recognized the application of the technology to industries other than railroads, but Sylvania was not interested. As a result Collins left his arrangement with Sylvania and created his own company called Computer Identics Corporation. Around the same time Philco sold the barcode patent rights to RCA.
Development began in earnest in the late 1960s, as the grocery industry now demanded such technology. Manufacturing was also becoming more complex and competitive and needed more sophisticated methods of inventory and asset control.
Collins’ Computer Identics quietly installed rudimentary, hand-built barcode and scanning systems in a General Motors (GM) plant in Michigan, and the General Trading Company in New Jersey. Kroger offered to test-drive the laser-guided system RCA was developing. In the 1970s, RCA’s limited success with its bullseye barcode attracted the attention of, you guessed it, IBM, who tapped staffer, Norman Woodland himself, to handle the project. The rest, they say, is history.
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