Happy Friday!
I hope that you had a good week and that May is off to a great start for you.
I was in the kitchen the other day and noticed that every banana in the bunch on the counter had a brand label with a barcode on it. I thought that was a bit much but realize that some people break the bunches in the store to buy only a certain number of bananas or the best-looking ones. Additionally, the supermarket selling these bananas changed their pricing structure to sell bananas by the piece rather than the pound. It made me wonder about barcodes in general and whether individual grapes will have barcodes on them next.
The barcode was invented by friends Normal Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver who patented the technology in 1952. When Silver was a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, he overheard the president of a local food chain asking one of the deans to come up with a system to automatically read product information at checkout. He and Woodland tried various strategies at Drexel, then Woodland left Drexel and moved to Florida. He was inspired to base it on Morse code, extending the dots and dashes to form thick and thin bars, drawing them in the sand on the beach. He used technology from optical movie soundtracks, shining light through the paper onto an RCA935 photomultiplier tube from a movie projector and decided to change the shape to a circle so it could be read from any direction. Their patient was for both linear and circular barcodes. Woodland, then working at IBM, tried to interest them in developing the system but they procrastinated; the patent was eventually purchased by Philco in 1962 and later sold to RCA.
It took over 2 decades for barcodes to become commercially successful. One of the first companies to incorporate barcodes was British Railways, perfecting a barcode reading system by 1962 that correctly read rolling stock traveling at 100 miles per hour (160 km/hr) with no mistakes! Impressive. This was not the small barcode we are used to seeing today – the bars were painted onto the steel plates affixed to each side of the railroad stock. The plates were read by a trackside scanner. Unfortunately, it didn't stand the test of time, becoming unreliable after long-term use (dirt was a major culprit), and was abandoned after 10 years. Meanwhile, a toll bridge in New Jersey requested a similar system for scanning cars displaying a monthly pass, and the US Postal Service wanted one to track trucks.
The big boon for barcodes was in supermarket checkout systems, where they are now used worldwide. George Laurer designed them for the Uniform Grocery Product Code (UPC) Council. His vertical bar system is now known as automatic identification and data capture (AIDC), first used successfully (again) in the U.K. in 1972 using shelf-mounted barcodes. Kroger was the first chain to test them in the U.S. Initially, the RCA barcodes were printed on adhesive-backed paper and manually attached to price tags by employees. However, the printers often smeared the ink, making the codes unreadable. IBM developed a linear code that was printed in the direction of the stripes so any extra ink would just make the stripes taller while still readable. Viola. IBM's system was accepted and tested at Marsh's Supermarket in Troy, Ohio near the production site. Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum was the first product scanned in 1974. Still, there was resistance to adopting it on a large scale, as it required expensive scanners and simultaneous printing of barcodes on all packaging. The U.S. Department of Defense adopted a code system for marking all products sold to the military and spurred the industrial use of barcodes.
Barcodes are used for almost everything now, including tracking luggage, patients, objects, people, tickets, boarding passes, cars, mail, inventory and much more. The resolution is down to the sub-pixel resolution in some applications. There are multiple types, including linear, 2D and matrix (including QR). The mapping between barcodes and messages is called a symbology – the encoding of the message into bars and spaces, start and stop markers and the size of the "quiet zone" required before and after the barcode in order to read it. The simplest scanners usually consist of a fixed light and a photosensor that is moved across the barcodes. The scanners are connected to a computer; many different types and models are available. Smartphones can decode barcodes (and QR codes) using their camera and internal software. Quality control and validation are required to meet industry standards and ensure consistent readings, which is done using a barcode verifier.
Barcodes have truly changed the world in point-of sale management, inventory and supply chain management, allowing rapid flexibility and data collection. There are codes designed to encode various languages and even matrix barcodes to help blind people navigate in public places.
Just leave the grapes alone.
Have a great weekend!
Deb
The composer's birth anniversary was yesterday, and it reminds me of the cute baby ducklings and goslings in my neighborhood now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrsY8eOSf4A