How the Barcode Became An Integral Part of Our Lives | The Lightbulb Moment

**Sanitized Transcript:**

[Music] In 1949, a man named Joseph Woodland sat in a chair on Miami Beach, doodling with his fingers in the sand. Woodland had quite a mind; he had worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. After the war, he continued his studies at Drexel in Philadelphia, where he learned about a local grocer who wanted a faster way to inventory and check out products. Woodland thought he had an answer: a machine-readable label for each item in the store.

Enthralled with the idea, Woodland moved to his grandfather’s apartment in Miami Beach to develop it further. While there, he often sat on the oceanfront, pondering how to make this theoretical solution a reality. He needed a simple code for the labels—something a machine, more akin to a typewriter than a modern-day computer, could read and log. Suddenly, he realized he already knew one: Morse code. He began drawing dots and dashes in the sand. This was the light bulb moment.

The modern barcode faced constant challenges, overcoming decades of skepticism and failures before it finally took over our stores. These little sequences of black and white bars are everywhere; they’ve been part of the technological foundation that has fueled the rise of everything from massive companies to world powers. Now, newly popular square barcodes are ushering barcode technology into our phones, allowing hundreds of times the information to be encoded in those little labels, opening up a whole new horizon of opportunities to link us to our digital world.

It all started with those doodles in the sand in 1949. A strange turn of events sparked that epiphany on Miami Beach. It began with a grocery chain executive in the 1940s who had simply had enough; running his operation was a nightmare. The problem was industry-wide: people were manually putting price stickers on products and hand-keying those prices into cash registers, spending a lot of time on every single product a shopper took through checkout.

This supermarket executive visited a dean at Drexel and begged for help to engineer a solution to his store’s inefficiencies. The Drexel dean brushed him off, but one of the postgraduates overheard the conversation and found it interesting. The postgraduate, Bob Silver, mentioned the conversation to his friend, Joseph Woodland. Together, they thought maybe they could invent something to help the supermarket executive. This random game of telephone got Woodland to move to Florida and start drawing dots and dashes in the sand.

The first early incarnation of a barcode was actually in a bullseye shape. Woodland had enough foresight to realize that when store checkers swiped items over the sensor, they would probably do so in various orientations. This created a problem because he was basing his code design on Morse code, which wouldn’t be readable from any angle. Woodland solved this by expanding the dots and dashes into circular lines, making it omnidirectional.

Looking at his sketch and reveling in the prospect that he may have invented something big, Woodland relayed the idea back to Bob Silver. Silver loved the idea, and the two got to work sketching out the mechanical schematics, finalizing their code design, and filing for a patent later that same year. They began constructing a prototype but soon realized the system wasn’t quite working. The problem was that the available components hadn’t caught up to the theory.

Woodland took a job at IBM, hoping to get the help he needed to make the system work, but even that couldn’t provide the technology to get it off the ground. Woodland shelved the idea, and almost two decades would pass before it saw the light of day again. By the late 1960s, it became clear that the grocery executive pleading with the Drexel dean years earlier was not alone. The grocery industry began discussing ways to harness technology to fix inefficiencies in their stores.

The chain Kroger helped kick off the industry’s efforts in 1966 when it released a pamphlet soliciting help developing a scanning system from electronics companies. This research led them to RCA, an enormous electronics firm. A dedicated group of RCA engineers took on the challenge and found Woodland and Silver’s patent. With new advances in technology, they realized they could make it work.

Two advances changed the game: the microchip, invented in 1958, and the laser, invented in 1960. By 1972, RCA’s team had created a working bullseye barcode system ready for Kroger to test in a real store. However, Kroger worried customers might reject it, associating lasers with advanced military applications. Hoping for the best, Kroger rolled out their new checkout system on July 3, 1972, in one of their Cincinnati stores. It was a success.

A group of high-ranking industry representatives soon toured the store, seeing the technology work. The industry’s commitment to scaling up the barcode renewed as profit margins dipped below 1%. While the bullseye code prototype worked in Kroger’s store, getting everyone in the industry on the same page was tough. After months of negotiating, the biggest players in both industries finally got behind the vision of putting a small label on every package, calling it the Universal Product Code (UPC).

The last thing to do was settle on the design of the standardized symbol itself. The code needed to be small, neat, and readable from any direction. The grocery industry accepted pitches based on these criteria from large electronics firms. Everyone thought RCA’s bullseye would be selected, but one engineer at IBM, George Laurer, doubted it could work at industry scale. Laurer figured out that a sequence of vertical bars could also be scanned from any angle.

To prove this, Laurer had a softball player pitch beanbag ashtrays with barcodes across the scanner, which logged each one correctly. IBM’s brass then pitched Laurer’s redesign to the grocery industry. The representative from IBM sealed the deal by pulling out a small wafer-sized disc, stating it contained all the computing power necessary to run a checkout system. Woodland, still at IBM, endorsed Laurer’s redesign, reiterating that the RCA bullseye would hold less data and be harder to print.

The grocery industry ditched RCA’s bullseye for IBM’s vertical bar design. The world met the modern barcode in Troy, Ohio, on June 26, 1974, at 8:01 a.m. in Marsh Supermarket when a cashier swiped a pack of gum. With that 67-cent purchase, a small-town supermarket thrust the global economy into a new era. The grocery industry had no idea the barcode would become so prolific.

Once industries saw the efficiencies gained in grocery, there was a lot of interest in using the barcode in other ways. The barcode was increasing efficiency in the distribution network and for consumers, leading to shorter checkout lines. By the 1970s, companies like Kmart, Target, and Walmart began using barcodes to keep track of goods on their vast store floors. Walmart, in particular, credited much of its success to the barcode, building its logistics network around it.

As China opened its economy in the 1980s, the pressure for lower prices helped push Walmart suppliers to contract cheap overseas labor. Soon, Walmart began cutting out the middleman altogether, setting up offices in China to teach manufacturers how to integrate directly into their supply chain. As more major companies did the same, China’s economy boomed, growing into the world’s second-largest economy.

The barcode was spreading around the world and became an essential part of our lives. It’s scanned 6 billion times a day, not just in grocery stores but also in postal services, warehouses, and medical settings. Even as the barcode became ubiquitous, it was changing. The standard barcodes we see are one-dimensional, meaning the coded information is only in the width of the lines. More recently, two-dimensional barcodes have emerged, using shapes to encode information on both the horizontal and vertical axes.

These include QR codes and other designs. While one-dimensional barcodes usually hold 12 digits, two-dimensional barcodes can hold more than 7,000 digits and 4,000 letters, allowing for more granular information about products. This opens up new possibilities for the amount and kind of data barcodes can hold, especially regarding food and consumer information.

Beyond shopping, QR codes allow people to access subway maps and find friends on payment apps. Other forms of identifiers are emerging, such as embedding identification in recyclable materials for automatic sorting in recycling centers. The UPC has been around for over 40 years and is not going away, but it’s unlikely we’ll see another data carrier last as long.

Looking back on the evolution of the barcode, we can see the many twists and turns revolutionary technology can take before it changes our lives. This invention resulted from not just one light bulb moment but many—from the imaginative grocer dreaming of automatic inventory systems to the postgrad who overheard a conversation, to Woodland’s moment on the beach, and the transformation of the bullseye symbol into the iconic barcode we know today. Little by little, bright minds built on each other’s ideas, making the barcode a backbone of the modern economy. Now, we are seeing new types of data carriers, and as we look ahead, one thing is for sure: Woodland’s sketch on Miami Beach has permanently changed the world.

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