The Barcode turns 70 year old ! What an amazing and brilliant invention - an invention on 7th October 1952, a patent was granted to American inventors Bernard Silver and Norman Woodland. Four years earlier, a shopkeeper in Pennsylvania went to the local university begging for help. He needed a way to get customers through his store quickly because logistics were stopping him meeting demand since typing in product numbers and prices into tills was cumbersome. An electronic system wasn’t possible, said the university. Silver overheard the conversation, set up shop in his parents’ apartment and enlisted Woodland.
Woodland’s eureka moment came when he was on a Miami beach, drawing morse code in the sand. Looking at his dots and dashes, he realised that differing lines or shapes could be used to encode different numbers. His initial design for the barcode, which consisted of concentric circles of varying width, was inspired by his swirls in the sand.
The first attempts at implementation barcode technology used an ultraviolet ink, but it rubbed off too easily – it would have to be a printed design. It took another two decades before barcode gained commercial success in supermarkets. In the intervening period barcodes did find use on the railways, plastered across freight trains to be scanned by lights and sensors – but huge operating costs soon put a stop to that.
There are billions of possible combinations of barcodes: the supply is limitless. A 13-digit EAN retail barcode can be presented ten trillion different ways. That’s enough for everyone on Earth to invent more than 1,200 different products – each with a unique barcode number.
radio-frequency identification (RFID) became available since the 1940 and has great adaption and even going main stream with Pay click and underground Oyster card payments solution and used in retails for stock taking and supply chain logistics for end-to-end deliveries.
