The first US patent for a bar code type product was issued in 1952 to Bernard Silver and Norman Woodland, who working upon the request of a food chain store owner for a simple way to put codes on products – for easy sorting, pricing and checking-out – came out with a symbol system using patterns of lines of varying widths to encode datum and product characteristics of choice.
And while the term bar code was first recorded in another US patent, the Process and apparatus for producing and reading Arabic numbers on a record sheet, filed in 1964, the call for real commercial implementation of bar codes started in the late 60s, when the National Association of Food Chains (NAFC) asked a company, called Logicon, to develop a proposal for an industry-wide bar code system that would speed the checkout process. And Logicon did not fail to deliver, coming up with the Parts 1 and 2 of the Universal Grocery Products Identification Code (UGPIC).
Based on the recommendations, the US Supermarket Ad Hoc Committee on a Uniform Grocery Product Code was formed and the American company Monarch Marking became the first to produce bar code equipment for retain, and the British company Plessey Telecommunications – for industrial use, in 1970.
Followed by a recommendation of the Committee on the adoption of the Universal Product Code UPC symbol; with its benefits first recorded in 1971, in the Texas Amarillo Globe-Times newspaper:”A universal product code system would produce economic and consumer benefits” and Bloom’s Productivity in Food Industry from 1972: “The Universal Product Code can provide a flow of information which may substantially improve the entire process of management decision-making” and the job of defining an encoding system, the Universal Product Code (UPC), entrusted to George Laurer, an IBM employee, and developed over the next two years to become a worldwide standard.
The first UPC scanner was installed at a Marsh’s supermarket in Troy, Ohio and on June 26, 1974, the first product with a bar code, a 10-pack Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum was scanned at the check-out counter, with rumour going around that the customer picked the pack of gums deliberately, led by doubts that a bar code could be printed on something as small as a pack of chewing gum, and that particular pack of Wrigley’s is today on display at the the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.
The UPC was initially designed for superstores with a large nomenclature of thousands of goods. The mass introduction of laser printers and optical reading systems facilitated the introduction of UPC equipment along the retail business, with “Optical reading done by using printed ‘bar-codes’; ie alternating lines and spaces which represent data in binary” (Computer science: an instructional manual, 1980).
In the following years, the bar code started appearing on more and more products, with The Times reporting in 1982 that: “Manufacturers are bar-coding enough goods to make laser scanning an attractive commercial proposition,” and 20 years later, nearly 90% of the top 500 US companies were already using the bar code.
