The Barcode: From Morse Code in the Sand to the Supermarket Beep

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On June 26, 1974, a cashier at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, scanned a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum. That beep ended a 20-year struggle. It began in 1948 at the Drexel Institute of Technology, where graduate student Bernard Silver overheard a food chain president begging for automated checkout. Silver and Norman Joseph Woodland first tried ultraviolet ink, which was costly and faded. Then Woodland, sitting on a Florida beach, drew Morse code in the sand and pulled the dots and dashes down into thick and thin lines.

This episode follows the idea through every near failure. Woodland's first reader paired a 500 watt bulb with a movie projector's sound technology, and IBM judged the concept decades ahead of affordable computing. David Collins tried colored stripes on railroad cars, lost to mud and grime, and turned to lasers. IBM's George Laurer then replaced the circular bullseye design with vertical stripes, and a military mandate finally forced manufacturers to print the codes.

The original 1952 patent showed a bullseye of concentric rings so a cashier could scan an item from any angle.
The railroads' KarTrak system was made the mandatory industry standard in 1967 and abandoned by the late 1970s because dirt blinded the scanners.
RCA's bullseye failed in an 18-month Kroger test in Cincinnati because fast printing presses smeared the rings, while smearing only makes vertical bars taller.
In 1976 Businessweek ran a piece titled The Supermarket Scanner That Failed, as stores and manufacturers each waited for the other to commit first.
Barcodes set off a 1970s panic, with Phil Donahue calling them a corporate plot and some religious groups linking them to the number of the beast.

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