Laser. This is what the team at supermarketPaul McEnroe insisted. Cash scanners and small laser weapons: you aim, you hit, you sell.
1969 was about an outrageous vision of the future. These lasers would scan strange little black-and-white markings on the products that McEnroe and his colleagues at IBM had designed. As a result, queues in supermarkets would accelerate. And so this solution would become known as barcode.
Obstacles overcome
At this point in history, barcodes had never been used commercially – although the idea had been brewing for decades following a patent registered in October 20, 1949 by one of the engineers who was now part of McEnroe’s team. IBM engineers were trying to bring barcodes to life. They had a vision of the future where customers would walk past the cash register with lasers that would scan each item they wanted to purchase. But IBM’s lawyers had a problem with the future.
“It’s out of the question,” they said, according to McEnroe, now a retired engineer. Their fear was “suicide by laser.” What if people intentionally hurt their eyes with scanners and then sued IBM? What if supermarket employees went blind?
No, no, it was a simple half-milliwatt laser beam, McEnroe tried to explain. There was 12,000 times more energy in a 60-watt light bulb. Their arguments fell on deaf ears. And so he turned to rhesus monkeys imported from Africa. After tests carried out in a nearby laboratory proved that exposure to the tiny laser did not harm the animals’ eyes, the lawyers backed down.
And that’s how barcode scanning became common in supermarkets across the US and, eventually, around the world.
In an unexpected turn of events, the lab McEnroe used told him they would send him the monkeys. Now it was his problem. “It was crazy,” he recalls, laughing. “I found a zoo in North Carolina.”
From idea to first use in a supermarket
Along with the monkeys, every human member of McEnroe’s team at IBM also deserves credit for the Universal Product Code (UPC), as their own version of the barcode was officially known. Among its members was Joe Woodland, the engineer who came up with the idea for barcodes decades earlier after drawing lines in the sand on a beach. It was he and another engineer who applied for a patent on the fundamental idea for bar codes in October 1949.
Crucially, George Laurer and other members of the IBM team took this pre-existing proposal for barcode-style tagging and developed it into a clean rectangle of vertical black lines that corresponded to a number that could uniquely identify any supermarket item imaginable. . From cans of soup to boxes of cereal or packets of spaghetti. The food industry officially adopted UPC in 1973, and the first UPC product was scanned at a Marsh supermarket in Ohio in 1974. From then on, it took the planet by storm.
Other types of barcodes soon followed, and the UPC also laid the groundwork for so-called “2D barcodes,” such as QR codes, which can encode even more information. But the story of these little black and white brands is much crazier.
“Revolution” in retail trade
One could argue that it all started with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
“I digitized things for the CIA,” explains McEnroe. “Very large maps.” This was one of the first jobs at IBM involving image scanners. As he explains in his book about the invention of the UPC barcode, this helped prepare him to work on an entirely new but relevant technology that would revolutionize the retail industry.
McEnroe knew that store checkout lines would go much faster if staff could simply scan products into a computer, rather than having to read the prices listed on each product and then manually process the sale. To be accepted, this code-reading system would have to work almost every time – and read the code correctly, even if the product was pulled through the reader at speeds of up to 100 inches per second.
The IBM team began working on the design patented by Woodland and his colleague – but with one important difference. The original approach was based on reading the thickness of black lines. One of the ideas they proposed in the patent – a round target-style barcode made up of concentric circles – had been developed by a competing team. But this proved difficult to print and even more difficult to place correctly on the product packaging.
The IBM team found it easier to print vertical lines and base the scanning process not on measuring the thickness of those lines, but on the distance between the leading edge of one line and the leading edge of the adjacent line. In other words, the space between the lines, which was more reflective and easier for the scanner to detect. This way, it didn’t matter if the label printer had too much ink and wrote thicker lines than intended – the scan would still work, almost always.
McEnroe points out that the launch of UPC barcode technology was not without controversy. “Our first store didn’t open,” he remembers. There were people outside complaining about the fact that prices were no longer written on each product, but simply on the shelves where the products were placed in the store. At the time, some unions believed – after all, and rightly so – that digitization technology threatened some supermarket jobs. There were also concerns that barcodes could be used to hide prices. These concerns soon dissipated. But barcodes have always bothered some people.
In fact, these “guard lines,” as they are known, serve as a reference point to help the laser scanner locate the beginning and end of each UPC sequence.
The “dystopia” of barcodes and QR codes
And yet, there is undeniably something strangely dystopian about barcodes. For some, they have become symbols of capitalism in its coldest form. They also frequently appear in scary movie scenes. The barcode, in this context, has echoes of the numbers tattooed on the arms of Nazi concentration camp prisoners during the Second World War.
Sometimes people use barcodes maliciously. Especially when it comes to QR codes, which instead of using vertical lines are made up of constellations of tiny black and white squares in a pattern readable by smartphone digital cameras. In September, the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah accused Israel of dropping leaflets containing a dangerous barcode, referred to in some reports as a QR code, that could “remove all information” from any device used to read it.
Despite some malicious uses of barcodes and the outrageous claims surrounding them, these markings now underpin thousands of industrial and commercial processes around the world. An estimated 10 billion barcodes are scanned worldwide every day, according to GS1, the organization that oversees UPC and QR code standards.
Source: BBC