A Linear Morse Code
A Linear Morse Code
Fifty years of barcode magic
My son loves grocery shopping. Actually, what he loves is checking out of the grocery store. When he was little, he’d stand in the cart, grab an item at his feet, and turn it round and round to find the barcode. Then he’d pass it over the scanner till he heard that satisfying “boop.” Magic! He’d giggle, toss that item off the side, and start all over as I scrambled to catch the flying goods. These days, he towers over the cart, but he’ll still insist on using the self check-out aisle so he can feel that barcode magic once again.
With its unassuming thick and thin lines underscored by an inscrutable set of a dozen numbers, the humble barcode often goes unnoticed and unappreciated as it sits unobtrusively on every can of corn and tube of toothpaste we buy. But barcodes helped revolutionize logistics, making it possible for grocers and retailers worldwide to efficiently track their goods, manage inventory, and provide faster service. No more cashiers punching individual prices into crotchety cash registers as lines stretch back to the deli section. No more managing eyeballing the shelves to guess-timate what’s selling well. Every day, billions of barcodes get scanned effortlessly across the globe.
The story behind the barcode’s invention is pretty magical, too. It traces its origins to a Miami beach in the winter of 1948-49, back to a grown-up Boy Scout named Joseph Woodland sitting idly in the sand.
Woodland was a Jersey boy born in Atlantic City in 1921. As a kid, he joined the Boy Scouts, where he learned Morse Code and cultivated a love of tinkering. He enrolled at Drexel Institute of Technology (now Drexel University) in Philadelphia, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor disrupted his plans. He left school to work as a technical assistant with the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, then returned to Drexel after the war. He graduated in 1947 and stayed for graduate school.
Woodland’s mind bubbled with practical ideas to address everyday problems. While an undergraduate at Drexel, he developed a way to provide continuous elevator music by recording 15 simultaneous audio tracks on 35-millimeter film. (I know, I know – elevator music wouldn’t be my first choice of a problem to solve, either!) He wanted to take the idea public, but his father nixed it. Elevator music was a mob-controlled industry, claimed the elder Woodland, whose experience in 1920s “Boardwalk Empire” Atlantic City had taught him to steer clear of the mob.
Thanks to his dad (and the mob), Woodland turned his mind to a different problem, one that would revolutionize the way the world shops. In 1948, a local grocery store official came to campus to discuss a profit-draining headache in his industry: how to encode product data efficiently so that stores could keep better track of inventory. Woodland’s fellow grad student, Bernard Silver, heard the official’s plea and told Woodland about it. The pair decided to tackle the challenge together.
Fixated with trying to solve the problem, Woodland left Drexel and spent the winter mulling it over at his grandparents’ apartment in Miami Beach. Sitting in the sand one day, the old Boy Scout remembered how Morse Code used dots and dashes to convey data. “What I’m going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale,” he later recalled. “I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason — I didn’t know — I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. I said: ‘Golly! Now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes.’ ” He then “took my four fingers — they were still in the sand — and I swept them around into a full circle.”
It was a classic “Aha!” moment. Woodland had envisioned a linear Morse Code of thin and thick lines that could be used to classify and send information electronically. In 1949, he and Silver applied for a patent for what they dubbed their “Classifying Apparatus and Method,” including both a linear and a circular “bullseye” design, as well as a prototype scanner to read the code.
Three years later, Woodland and Silver received the patent, and the world . . . changed not a whit. Woodland, who by that time was working at IBM, could not convince the higher-ups to pursue the idea. It was just too cumbersome and expensive given existing technology. To be economically viable, their proposed scanner needed high-powered lasers and digital-image sensors that simply did not exist yet. Discouraged, Woodland and Silver eventually sold their patent to Philco for $15,000, which turned out to be the only money they ever made from their revolutionary idea.
The barcode lay dormant for two decades. The patent expired in 1969 having never reached its potential. But by the early 1970s, technology had finally caught up and supermarket industry executives, motivated to control costs in an era of spiraling inflation, were ready for revolution. They embarked on what one historian called “the grocery industry's Manhattan Project” to create a Universal Product Code (UPC) that could be used for any item sold in any store anywhere. Several companies vied to create the design. The winner? IBM, where Joseph Woodland still worked. He helped an IBM colleague, George Laurer, tweak the original design to create the basic barcode my son knows and loves.
But would it actually work in the real world? The first big test came on June 26, 1974. National Cash Register, headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, outfitted a Marsh Supermarket in nearby Troy with a $10,000 checkout counter ($61,800 in today’s dollars) and a $4,000 scanner ($24,700 today). A cashier used the scanner to ring up a 67-cent ten-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum. Boop! Success! A pack of that gum now lives in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
Source: Smithsonian Magazine
In the half century since that famous first sale, barcodes have been used in trillions of transactions. Their scope has grown far beyond the checkout aisle, and they are used for more than just selling more stuff – hospitals use them to track patients, NASA places them on its heat tiles, researchers put them on animals to monitor behavior, regulatory agencies follow barcode data to trace contaminated food back to their source. They are ubiquitous and essential to modern life.
Woodland died in 2012 at the age of 91, but his barcode lives on despite many premature predictions of its demise. Next time you’re at the store, take a second to notice and appreciate the remarkable linear Morse Code that Joseph Woodland first drew in the Miami sand. It really is pretty magical.
Sources
· Randy Alfred, “June 26, 1974: Supermarket Scanner Rings Up Historic Pack of Gum,” Wired, June 26, 2008.
· Margalit Fox, “N. Joseph Woodland, Inventor of the Bar Code, Dies at 91,” New York Times, Dec. 12, 2021.
· Tony Seideman, “Barcodes Sweep the World,” Wonders of Modern Technology, Spring 1993.
· Ker Than, “Bar Code: Its Origins, Why It's on Google & What's Next,” National Geographic News, Oct. 7, 2009.
· Gavin Weightman, Eureka: How Invention Happens (Yale University Press, 2015).
o “The History of the Bar Code,” Smithsonian Magazine, Sept. 23, 2015.
· Norman Woodland, Original Patent (US2612994A)