59 Fun Facts About Barcode

Where was Bernard Silver a graduate student when he overheard a grocery executive asking for automatic checkout?

Silver was a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia in 1948 when the president of the Food Fair chain asked a dean for a way to read product data automatically at checkout.

What was wrong with Woodland and Silver's first working system, which used ultraviolet ink?

The ink faded too easily and was expensive, so Woodland left his studies and moved into his father's Florida apartment to keep refining the idea.

Woodland formed his first barcode by drawing in what?

Woodland drew the first barcode in sand on a beach in Miami: he extended Morse code dots and dashes downward into narrow and wide lines.

Woodland later decided the code would scan better from any direction if printed in what shape?

A circle of concentric rings, the 'bull's eye', appeared in the October 1949 patent application beside the linear version, because it reads the same from any direction.

Woodland recalled Morse code from his training with which organization?

Woodland learned Morse code as a member of The Boy Scouts; during World War II he served as a technical assistant on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge.

Under what number was Woodland and Silver's 1952 'Classifying Apparatus and Method' registered?

US Patent 2,612,994 was granted on 7 October 1952 for the 'Classifying Apparatus and Method' application filed on 20 October 1949.

Which company bought the Woodland-Silver rights in 1962 before selling them on to RCA?

Philco bought the patent in 1962 and later resold it to RCA; IBM, Woodland's employer from 1951, had offered to buy it earlier but its offer was not accepted.

The KarTrak system of the 1960s used colored reflective stripes to identify what?

KarTrak labels on railroad cars were read by trackside scanners; the Association of American Railroads made them standard in 1967 before dropping the scheme in the late 1970s.

David Collins left Sylvania to found which company, whose scanners used helium-neon lasers?

Computer Identics Corporation, founded by Collins in 1968, installed one of its first two helium-neon laser scanners at a Buick plant in Flint, Michigan, in 1969 to sort transmissions on a conveyor.

Which grocery chain volunteered to test RCA's bullseye code in the early 1970s?

Kroger volunteered a Cincinnati store for the trial; RCA's bullseye scanner went live there in July 1972 and ran for an 18-month test.

Why did IBM's straight-bar design beat RCA's bullseye in the 1973 selection?

Printers smeared ink in the direction of the stripes, so extra ink simply extended the bars while keeping them readable.

Which IBM engineer designed the Universal Product Code symbol chosen in 1973?

George Laurer, working at IBM's Research Triangle Park site in North Carolina, turned Woodland's earlier idea into the rectangular UPC symbol adopted in 1973.

On what date was the IBM UPC selected as the grocery industry standard?

The grocery industry's symbol selection committee picked IBM's design on 3 April 1973; IBM had prepared five UPC versions, A through E, for future needs.

What was the first product ever scanned with a UPC at a retail checkout?

A 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum was the first retail UPC sale, rung up on an NCR register at 8:01 a.m. on 26 June 1974.

The first UPC scan took place at a Marsh supermarket in which Ohio town?

Marsh's store in Troy, Ohio, was picked because NCR, which built the scanner and register, was based nearby in Dayton.

How much did the first UPC-scanned item ring up for in 1974?

The first item rang up 67 cents on an NCR register at a Marsh supermarket in Ohio at 8:01 a.m. on 26 June 1974.

How many digits does a standard UPC-A barcode contain?

A UPC-A holds 12 digits, each drawn as two bars and two spaces, giving 24 digit bars plus six guard bars for 30 bars in all.

What is the purpose of the final numeral in a UPC?

The last numeral is an error-detecting check digit: scanners recompute it from the preceding digits with a weighted sum and reject a code that does not match.

Each digit in a UPC is encoded as two bars and two spaces totaling how many units of width?

Each digit spans 7 modules of width split into two bars and two spaces; left-hand digits use odd parity and right-hand digits even parity, so a scanner can tell which way it read.

Which UPC consultant came up with adding human-readable numbers below the bars as a fail-safe?

Murray Eden, an MIT scientist advising the UPC symbol committee, insisted on printing the digits beneath the bars so a clerk could key them in if the scanner failed.

Which consulting firm helped the grocery industry define the numerical UPC format?

McKinsey & Company consultants Larry Russell and Tom Wilson worked with the grocery trade associations' ad hoc committee to define the numeric format that became the UPC.

Which magazine ran a 1976 article headlined 'The Supermarket Scanner That Failed'?

Business Week's 1976 piece captured a chicken-and-egg stall: retailers would not buy scanners until products carried codes, and makers would not print codes until stores had scanners.

The UK's first successful barcode system, in 1972, used Plessey shelf codes at which supermarket chain?

British Railways had already perfected a system that read rolling stock at 100 mph by 1962.

Which barcode did the US Defense Department adopt in 1981 for products sold to the military?

Code 39, invented at Intermec in 1974, became the Defense Department's LOGMARS standard in 1981, a program widely seen as the catalyst for industrial barcoding.

How many characters does the Code 39 specification define?

The specification defines 43 characters: the 26 uppercase letters, the ten digits and seven symbols (space, hyphen, period, $, /, + and %), with the asterisk reserved as start/stop.

Which barcode symbology carries the GTIN on shipping cartons and outer cases?

ITF-14 is an Interleaved 2 of 5 symbol, printed inside a thick bearer-bar frame, that carries the 14-digit GTIN on cases and cartons.

Codabar, developed by Pitney Bowes in 1972, was adopted for which two kinds of documents?

Codabar's self-checking design reads reliably from dot-matrix multi-part forms, which is why FedEx airbills and blood bank forms adopted it.

The EAN-13 barcode used outside North America is an extension of UPC-A with what added?

EAN-13 adds an optional country-of-registration prefix: its leading digits identify the national numbering organisation the manufacturer joined, not necessarily where the product was made.

Which EAN prefix has been reserved since the 1980s for books identified by ISBN, regardless of country?

The 978 'Bookland' prefix lets the EAN system carry ISBNs directly instead of running a parallel numbering scheme; the 979 prefix was opened for ISBNs later.

Which British retailer announced a book numbering system in 1965 that grew into the ISBN?

WHSmith, with other booksellers, commissioned the nine-digit Standard Book Number in 1965; it was devised by Gordon Foster, a statistics professor at Trinity College Dublin.

The 10-digit ISBN was published in 1970 as which international standard?

ISO 2108, published in 1970, made the 10-digit ISBN an international standard; any nine-digit SBN converted by prefixing a zero.

The Uniform Code Council and the European Article Numbering Association merged into which body?

GS1 became the worldwide name in 2005 when the Uniform Code Council and EAN International combined; the UCC itself was renamed GS1 US.

Where is GS1's main office?

GS1's global office is in Brussels, where the European Article Numbering Association had been founded in 1977 with members from 12 countries.

The QR code was invented in 1994 by Masahiro Hara at which Japanese company?

Denso Wave, a Denso subsidiary, devised the QR code in 1994 to track automobile parts, replacing several barcode labels on each box with a single one.

What does the 'QR' in QR code stand for?

QR stands for Quick Response: the code was designed for fast decoding and far greater capacity than a UPC, which helped it spread beyond the car industry.

The alternating black-and-white design of the QR code was inspired by the counters of which board game?

Hara took the black-and-white grid from the stones of Go, which he played at lunch; the corner finder patterns use the 1:1:3:1:1 ratio, the least common pattern on printed matter.

Which error-correction method lets a damaged QR code still be read?

Reed–Solomon coding adds redundant codewords; at the highest level (H) about 30% of a QR code can be damaged and the data recovered, at the cost of capacity.

Which of these is one of the four standardized QR code encoding modes?

Kanji mode packs Shift JIS characters into 13 bits each; the other three standard modes are numeric, alphanumeric and byte.

What did the QR code's inventing company do with its key patent to encourage adoption?

The inventing company waived its rights for standardized codes, promising not to enforce its QR patent, so anyone could generate or read the symbols free of charge.

Masahiro Hara and his QR code team received which prize in 2014?

The team won the European Inventor Award's Popular Prize from the European Patent Office at a Berlin ceremony in 2014, twenty years after the invention.

How many modules per side does the smallest QR code, Version 1, have?

Version 1, the smallest QR code, is a 21-by-21 module grid; each higher version adds four modules per side, up to Version 40 at 177 by 177.

Which common QR payment code did India's NPCI and card networks launch in 2017?

BharatQR, launched in February 2017 at the Reserve Bank of India's direction, was developed by NPCI (RuPay), Mastercard and Visa so one printed code accepts payment from any card network.

PDF417, the stacked barcode on many driver's licenses, was invented in 1991 at which company?

Ynjiun P. Wang designed PDF417 at Symbol Technologies in 1991; as a stacked linear code it can be read by sweeping a laser scanner down its rows.

MaxiCode, the hexagonal-dot 'bird's eye' symbol with a central bullseye, was made for which company?

United Parcel Service created MaxiCode, a one-inch-square symbol of hexagonal dots around a bullseye, for sorting and tracking parcels, and placed it in the public domain.

A Data Matrix symbol can store up to how many alphanumeric characters?

The largest Data Matrix (144 by 144 modules) holds up to 2,335 alphanumeric characters; every symbol has a solid L-shaped finder border on two adjacent sides.

The Aztec Code matrix symbol was invented in 1995 by Robert Hussey and whom?

Its name comes from the central bullseye finder pattern that resembles an Aztec pyramid seen from above.

Which technology's first true ancestor was Mario Cardullo's 1973 passive radio transponder?

RFID's first true ancestor was Cardullo's passive transponder with memory, patented in 1973; Charles Walton's 1983 patent was the first associated with the abbreviation RFID.

Which products carry a UPC-A whose number-system digit is 3?

A leading 3 marks pharmaceuticals: the UPC then carries the 10-digit National Drug Code, while 2 flags random-weight items and 5 flags coupons.

CCD barcode readers, also called LED scanners, read a code using what?

A CCD reader uses a row of hundreds of tiny light sensors to measure light reflected from the code, whereas a laser scanner sweeps a beam with a rotating mirror.

Most modern USB barcode scanners present themselves to a computer as what kind of device?

A USB scanner enumerates as a keyboard (a USB HID device) and 'types' the decoded digits; earlier keyboard-wedge scanners sat physically between a PS/2 keyboard and the PC.

Since 2005 airlines have used an IATA-standard 2D barcode on what?

From 2008, codes sent to phones enabled electronic boarding passes.

The 1991 Barcode Battler handheld game generated combat statistics by scanning what?

Barcode Battler, released by Epoch in 1991, let players swipe ordinary product labels from groceries and household goods to generate each fighter's stats.

The protagonist of which video game series has a barcode tattooed on the back of his head?

Hitman's Agent 47 bears a barcode tattoo on the back of his head, a mark of his origins as a cloned assassin.

Which TV host called barcodes a 'corporate plot against consumers'?

Talk-show host Phil Donahue made the 'corporate plot' charge amid 1970s fears that scanning would let stores drop individual price tags; some religious groups saw barcodes as the Number of the Beast.

Woodland received which honor from President George H. W. Bush in 1992?

Woodland received the National Medal of Technology from President George H. W. Bush in 1992; IBM had given him its Outstanding Contribution Award in 1973.

Bernard Silver died in 1963 at what age, long before the barcode became a commercial success?

Silver was 38 when he died in 1963; born in 1924, he never saw the first supermarket scan in 1974.

Sims Supermarkets became the first stores in which country to use barcodes, in 1979?

Sims Supermarkets were the first stores in Australia to scan barcodes, starting in 1979, five years after the first US supermarket scan.

Which pet-food maker asked the Sylvania team for a cheap barcode to track cases of its product?

The Sylvania team's reflective-label technology also served a New Jersey toll bridge and US Post Office trucks; Kal Kan then asked for a simpler, cheaper version to track cases of pet food.

Why was the KarTrak colored-stripe labelling system abandoned in the late 1970s?

Dirt easily fooled the system: grime on the reflective labels caused misreads, so the scheme was dropped in the late 1970s even though 95 percent of the fleet had been labeled by 1974.