Bar Code

In 1948 Bernard Silver (1924–63), a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, USA overheard the president of a local food chain asking one of the deans to research a system to automatically read product information during checkout. Silver told his friend Norman Joseph Woodland (1921-) about the request, and they started working on a variety of systems. Their first working system used ultraviolet ink, but this proved to fade and was fairly expensive.

On 20 October 1949 Woodland and Silver filed a patent application for "Classifying Apparatus and Method", in which they described both the linear and bullseye printing patterns, as well as the mechanical and electronic systems needed to read the code. The patent was issued on 7 October 1952 as US Patent 2,612,994. In 1951, Woodland moved to IBM and continually tried to interest IBM in developing the system. The company eventually commissioned a report on the idea, which concluded that it was both feasible and interesting, but that processing the resulting information would require equipment that was some time off in the future.

The Boston and Maine Railroad tested the system on their gravel cars in 1961. The tests continued until 1967, when the Association of American Railroads (AAR) selected it as a standard across the entire North American fleet. The installations began on October 10, 1967. However, the economic downturn and rash of bankruptcies in the industry in the early 1970s greatly slowed the rollout, and it wasn't until 1974 that 95% of the fleet was labeled. To add to its woes, the system was found to be easily fooled by dirt in certain applications, and the accuracy was greatly affected. The AAR abandoned the system in the late 1970s, and it was not until the mid-1980s that they introduced a similar system, this time based on radio tags.[citation needed]

Collins then quit Sylvania and formed Computer Identics. Computer Identics started working with helium-neon lasers in place of light bulbs, scanning with a mirror to locate the barcode anywhere up to several feet in front of the scanner. This made the entire process much simpler and more reliable, as well as allowing it to deal with ripped codes by reading the intact portions.

In 1966 the National Association of Food Chains (NAFC) held a meeting where they discussed the idea of using automated checkout systems. RCA, having purchased rights to the original Woodland patent, had attended the meeting and set up an internal project to develop a system based on the bullseye code. The Kroger grocery chain volunteered to test it.

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