Today, bar codes are everywhere. Rental car companies keep track of their fleet by means of bar codes on the car bumper. Airlines track passenger luggage, reducing the chance of loss believe it or not. NASA relies on bar codes to monitor the thousands of heat tiles that need to be replaced after every space shuttle trip, and the movement of nuclear waste is tracked with a bar-code inventory system.
Bar codes even appear on humans! Fashion designers stamp bar codes on their models to help coordinate fashion shows.
The codes store information about what outfits each model should be wearing and when they are due on the runway. The best-known and most widespread use of bar codes has been on consumer products. The Universal Product Code, or U. Most technological innovations are first invented and then a need is found for the invention. The U. Believing that automating the grocery checkout process could reduce labor costs, improve inventory control, speed up the process, and improve customer service, six industry associations, representing both product manufacturers and supermarkets, created an industry wide committee of industry leaders.
Their two-year effort resulted in the announcement of the Universal Product Code and the U. Those numbers were not achieved in that time frame and there were those who predicted the demise of bar code scanning. The usefulness of the barcode required the adoption of expensive scanners by a critical mass of retailers while manufacturers simultaneously adopted bar code labels.
A analysis by Price Waterhouse Coopers estimates the U. Even more astounding, the study concludes that the industry has not yet taken advantage of billions of dollars of potential savings that could be derived from maximizing the use of the U. The big winners — as one should have expected given the competitive nature of the markets involved — were consumers, since U.
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What type of Barcode are you scanning? Get help from a Printer Expert! How many labels will you print per day? Get help from an ID Expert! How many IDs will you print per year? Get help from a POS Expert! What is your POS application? Retail Restaurant Mobile Payment. George Laurer, the US engineer who helped develop the barcode, has died at the age of Barcodes, which are made up of black stripes of varying thickness and a digit number, help identify products and transformed the world of retail.
The idea was pioneered by a fellow IBM employee, but it was not until Laurer developed a scanner that could read codes digitally that it took off. Laurer died last Thursday at his home in Wendell, North Carolina, and his funeral was held on Monday. He developed a scanner that could read codes digitally. He also used stripes rather than circles that were not practical to print.
In the early s, grocery shops faced mounting costs and the labour-intensive need to put price tags on everything. It took four years to arrive at a workable proposition to put to the whole industry. Tracing the long pre-history of five twentieth-century inventions which have transformed our lives, Gavin Weightman reveals a fantastic cast of scientists and inspired amateurs whose ingenuity has given us the airplane, television, bar code, personal computer, and mobile phone.
In the end, seven companies, all of them based in the United States, submitted systems to the Symbol Committee, a technical offshoot of the Ad Hoc Committee. RCA, having demonstrated to the committee its system in Cincinnati, took the view, not unreasonably, that it was the only real contender.
It had no technology at all to demonstrate to the committee, and the decision to enter the competition appears to have been an afterthought, despite the fact that it had in its employ none other than Joe Woodland. That fell to George Laurer, who, in his own view, had an advantage over his rivals because neither he nor IBM had given supermarket checkout systems or bar codes much thought and his company had no ready-made technology.
Laurer was handed the specifications for a bar code that had been determined by the Symbol Selection Committee: it had to be small and neat, maximum 1. Although there was skepticism in IBM, Laurer was convincing enough to be given the go-head with a rectangular bar code.
Evans himself. However at the end of a flawless demonstration for Mr. Evans, we had our ace softball pitcher pitch beanbag ash trays, with symbols on the bottom, as fast as he could over the scanner. When each one read correctly, Mr. Evans was convinced. After asking for an appraisal of the rival symbologies from scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on March 30, , in a New York hotel close to Grand Central Station, the committee met to make its final and fateful decision. For Woodland, who died in at the age of 91, it must have been a strange experience to witness the reincarnation in sophisticated form of the elongated lines of Morse Code he had drawn in the sand in There was now a modestly priced laser scanner to register with a concentrated beam of light the coded vertical lines of alternating black and blank and a microcomputer to decipher the information.
Like so many inventions, the UPC was not an immediate success. It was when the mass merchandisers adopted the UPC that it took off, Kmart being the first. In fact, bar code technology was almost made for companies like Walmart, which deal in thousands of goods that need to be catalogued and tracked. The bar code took off in the grocery and retail business in the s, and at the same time began to transform manufacturing and to appear like a rash on anything that benefited from instant identification.
In , F ortune magazine estimated that the bar code was used by 80 to 90 percent of the top companies in the United States. Though the inspiration for the bar code was the plea by supermarkets for technology that would speed up the checkout, its greatest value to business and industry is that it has provided hard, statistical evidence for what sells and what does not.
The once-dreaded "death ray" laser beam now comes in handy gun-sized scanners that instantly read and log anything from hospital drugs to newborn babies. After many years of anonymity, the man whose knowledge of Morse Code inspired the familiar black and white stripes finally got some recognition.
In February , President George H.
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