60 Fun Facts About Barcode

Which two men are credited with inventing the barcode, patented in the US in 1952?

Their idea was Morse code extended into thin and thick bars; it took more than twenty years to become a commercial success.

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

The executive was the president of the Food Fair chain, and Silver told his friend Woodland about the request.

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

Woodland then quit Drexel and moved into his father's Florida apartment to keep working on the problem.

Woodland formed his first barcode by drawing in what?

'I just extended the dots and dashes downwards and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them.'

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

The 'bull's eye' pattern was described in the 1949 patent application alongside the linear version.

Woodland recalled Morse code from his training with which organization?

He had also served on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge as a technical assistant during World War II.

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

The application, titled 'Classifying Apparatus and Method', had been filed on 20 October 1949.

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

IBM, where Woodland worked from 1951, had offered to buy it earlier but the offer was not accepted.

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

Developed at GTE Sylvania, it was adopted across North America in 1967 but proved too easily fooled by dirt.

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

One of its first two systems went into a Buick factory in Flint, Michigan in 1969 to identify transmissions on a conveyor.

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

The 18-month test in a Cincinnati store revealed that smeared ink made the circular code unreadable.

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?

He worked at IBM's Research Triangle Park facility in North Carolina and built on Woodland's more general idea.

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

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?

The 10-pack of gum rang up 67 cents 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?

NCR installed the test system there because it was near the factory producing the equipment.

How much did the first barcode-scanned pack of gum ring up for?

A facsimile of the gum packet is displayed at the Smithsonian's American history museum.

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

Every UPC-A also has exactly 30 bars: six for guard patterns and 24 for the digits.

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

It lets scanners and clerks catch some mistakes in scanning or manual entry.

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

Digits exist in odd and even parity forms so the code can be scanned in either direction.

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

The MIT scientist also chose the font, so a clerk can key the number in if the scanner fails.

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

Larry Russell and Tom Wilson of the firm worked with the trade associations that formed the Uniform Product Code Council in 1973.

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

Neither retailers nor manufacturers wanted to move first, and projected savings of $40 million did not appear on schedule.

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?

The LOGMARS program is widely viewed as the catalyst for barcoding in industry.

How many characters does the Code 39 specification define?

They are the uppercase letters, ten digits and a handful of special characters such as $, / and +.

Code 128 was developed in 1981 by which company?

It was David Collins's firm, the same one that put lasers into barcode scanners.

Codabar, developed by Pitney Bowes in 1972, is still used on which two kinds of documents?

It was designed to be read accurately even when printed on dot-matrix printers.

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

The prefix identifies the GS1 member 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 'Bookland' prefix lets the EAN system catalog books by ISBN instead of running a parallel numbering scheme; 979 was added later.

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

The system was devised by Gordon Foster, a statistics professor at Trinity College Dublin.

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

Any 9-digit SBN could be converted by prefixing a zero.

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

The name GS1 was adopted worldwide in 2005; the group now has 120 local member organizations across 150 countries.

Where is GS1's main office?

The European Article Numbering Association had been founded there in 1977 with members from 12 countries.

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

Its original job was tracking automobile parts, replacing several barcode labels on each box with a single one.

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

Faster reading and greater capacity than a UPC helped it spread far beyond the car industry.

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

The corner position markers use the ratio 1:1:3:1:1, chosen as the least common pattern found on printed matter.

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

The higher the correction level, the less data the code can hold.

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

The others are numeric, alphanumeric and byte/binary.

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

Its US patent 5,726,435 eventually expired on 14 March 2015.

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

The ceremony in Berlin marked the 20th anniversary of the invention.

How many Americans scanned a QR code with a mobile device in 2022?

That was up 26 percent from 2020, driven by payments and restaurant menus.

India's central bank launched which common QR payment code in 2016?

It was developed jointly with RuPay, Mastercard, Visa and American Express.

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

Ynjiun P. Wang designed it; a stacked code can be read by sweeping a simple linear scanner over it.

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

Donald Chandler and Eric Batterman designed the one-inch-square public-domain code in 1987.

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

Every Data Matrix 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?

Charles Walton received the first patent to use the abbreviation itself in 1983.

Which country issued the first RFID 'e-passports' in 1998?

RFID tags have since made inroads on the identification market that barcodes long dominated.

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

Laser scanners instead sweep a beam across the code using a rotating mirror wheel.

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

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?

In the 1970s and 80s software was sometimes printed on paper as barcodes using formats like Cauzin Softstrip.

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

WWE's D-Generation X also put a barcode in its entrance video and on a T-shirt.

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

Some Christian fundamentalists and Russian Old Believers see them as a manifestation of the Number of the Beast.

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

IBM had given him its Outstanding Contribution Award back in 1973.

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

He never saw the first supermarket scan in 1974.

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

By then the US grocery industry had been scanning for five years.

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

After the railway system flopped, the same technology found work on a New Jersey toll bridge and on US Post Office trucks before Kal Kan wanted it for inventory.

Why did the railroads eventually abandon the KarTrak colored-stripe car labels in the late 1970s?

It took until 1974 for 95 percent of the North American fleet to be labeled, and by the mid-1980s the railroads switched to a similar system based on radio tags.