55 Fun Facts About Barcode

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

Drexel Institute of Technology is where a grocery executive begged a dean for help in 1948; the dean refused, so Silver took the problem to his friend Woodland.

What was wrong with Woodland and Silver's ultraviolet ink system?

The ink faded too easily and was expensive, but Woodland was sure the idea could work, so he quit Drexel and moved to his grandfather's Florida apartment.

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.

To read his striped code, what existing technology did Woodland adapt?

Movie soundtracks were played by shining light through a patterned strip onto a sensitive tube, so Woodland's reader paired a 500-watt bulb with a tube taken from movie projectors.

Woodland recalled Morse code from his training with which organization?

The Boy Scouts taught Woodland Morse code, and he later stretched its dots and dashes into the wide and narrow lines that became the barcode.

In 1932, Wallace Flint imagined an automated grocery checkout built around what?

Punch cards: Flint's 1932 thesis had shoppers punch cards to mark their picks for a reader, but card equipment was so bulky and costly the plan was never practical.

Which company bought Woodland and Silver's barcode patent, later selling it to RCA?

Philco bought it after the pair failed to get IBM to build a system that needed equipment still years off, and later sold the patent to RCA.

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.

Why did David Collins leave Sylvania to found his own barcode company?

His bosses refused new funding for a black-and-white code for other industries, saying their big market was enough, so Collins quit and founded Computer Identics.

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

Kroger volunteered as RCA's guinea pig once RCA took up bar codes after a 1966 grocery meeting, and an 18-month test began at a Cincinnati store in July 1972.

What advantage did IBM's bars hold over RCA's bullseye?

Smeared ink only made it taller, not unreadable: presses smear ink in the direction the paper runs, so extra ink ran off the ends of the bars instead of blurring the code.

Who refused his manager's appeal to base IBM's grocery code on the bullseye?

George Laurer won over IBM's skeptical bosses with a rectangular code instead, and the grocery industry's selection committee chose his design over RCA's in 1973.

What worried IBM executives at a 1971 grocery industry meeting?

Crowds at RCA's booth made IBM fear losing a huge market, and then a marketing specialist remembered that the bar code's inventor, Woodland, still worked at IBM.

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

Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum was scanned first, in 1974, yet scanners spread slowly because stores gained little until most products carried the codes.

Which company installed the checkout system for the first UPC scan in 1974?

NCR fitted the new checkout, and the night before the first scan Marsh staff put bar code labels on the store's goods, since few products yet carried printed codes.

A UPC names the product and what else?

Its maker: on most items, a firm registers once for its own company number, then gives each product an item number under it.

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.

Why do UPC halves draw digits differently?

So it scans in either direction: left-hand digits use odd parity and right-hand digits even, so the scanner can tell which end it started from.

Why did Murray Eden have digits printed under the UPC's bars?

In case scanners fail: a clerk could enter the digits instead, and the selection committee also changed the digits' font from IBM's proposal.

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

McKinsey & Company helped set the product number first; the grocery council then asked many companies, among them RCA, Singer and Pitney Bowes, to design a symbol for it.

Why was the 1973 UPC a bigger deal than the barcode systems before it?

Every equipped store could read it, because grocers and product makers agreed on one standard symbol instead of each system using its own code.

Which UK supermarket chain had Plessey shelf barcodes up and running by 1972?

Sainsbury's put the codes on its shelves, not on packs, so staff could scan each product's spot and order just enough stock to refill it.

What could Code 39 hold that a supermarket UPC could not?

Letters and digits, and each character checks itself, so one faulty bar can't turn it into a different valid character.

Why do box barcodes often have a black frame?

Prevent misreads: a slanting beam entering through the top or bottom edge could miss bars, and the frame also evens out printing plate pressure.

Which two kinds of paperwork used the Codabar barcode?

FedEx airbills and blood bank forms used it, as do many libraries; Codabar checks itself, so it needs no extra check digit to catch misreads.

EAN-13, the barcode used outside North America, is a UPC-A with what added?

A country prefix: that extra digit let each nation flag its own codes, so the same symbol spread worldwide under local names such as Japan's JAN.

Why do book barcodes start 978 or 979?

So ISBNs fit in: a book's barcode carries its ISBN digits, sparing shops a second, parallel numbering system.

Which country's book trade began the nine-digit Standard Book Number that became the ISBN?

Britain: a 1966 report for the UK book trade by statistician Gordon Foster set out the scheme, and ISO then adapted the British number for worldwide use.

Apart from the title and edition, what does part of every ISBN identify?

The publisher, or imprint; the title part is unique to each edition and format, so a book's hardback and paperback get different numbers.

Before Apple's iOS 11 in 2017, what did iPhone owners usually need to scan a QR code?

A separate reader app: iOS 11's own camera began reading the codes by default, popping up the link with no extra software needed.

On many books, what does the small second barcode beside the main one hold?

The suggested price: unlike a typical grocery code, which the till matches to a price, its five digits give the currency and amount, as 51050 for $10.50.

What was the QR code first invented to keep track of?

Car parts: workers faced as many as ten barcodes on a single box, so Denso Wave built one code to carry all that information in a single scan.

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

Quick response, named for fast reading; the codes spread from industry to Japan's public once mobile phones that could read them went on sale.

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

Go: Hara played it on his lunch break, and arranging its black and white stones on the grid showed him a simple way to convey information.

What are a QR code's three corner squares for?

Reading at any angle: the squares' 1:1:3:1:1 black-and-white ratio is rare on printed matter, so a reader spots them fast and works out which way the code faces.

What did the QR code's maker do with its patent?

Waived its rights for standardized codes, hoping other firms would build on the code, and that free use helped QR spread worldwide.

What did an urban legend claim was secretly hidden in every UPC barcode?

The number 666: the guard bars at the start, middle and end look like the bars for a 6, though they encode no digit.

Why do some QR codes have finer grids?

More data: each version up adds four modules a side, from 21 by 21 to 177 by 177, so longer links make denser codes.

Most barcode scanners shine which color of light, making bars printed in it invisible to them?

Red: a red beam bounces off red ink just as it does off white paper, so red bars vanish, while black, blue or green bars soak it up and read as dark.

PDF417, the barcode on many driver's licenses, is made of what?

Rows of small linear codes: neighboring rows draw their bar patterns from different sets, so a scanner sweeping across can tell which row it is reading.

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

United Parcel Service prints it on shipping labels, where it carries each parcel's postal code, country and class of service to help sort packages.

Data Matrix, a 2D barcode, is especially popular for marking what?

Very small items: it is among the most compact barcodes, and electronics industry standards use it to mark tiny components and even silicon wafers.

Why can an Aztec Code skip a blank margin?

Its target is central: scanners find the code from the middle, not the edges, though some readers still want a thin margin.

Mario Cardullo patented a passive radio transponder with memory in 1973, an early form of which technology?

RFID: Cardullo's device drew power from the reader's radio signal, needed no battery, and held rewritable memory for its first planned job, collecting road tolls.

CCD scanners read barcodes using what?

A row of hundreds of tiny light sensors: it reads the whole code at once, so unlike a pen reader it needs no steady swipe across the bars.

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

A keyboard: the scanner types each code's characters as if keyed in by hand, as early 'keyboard wedge' readers did by plugging in between a PC and its keyboard.

Airlines worldwide use an IATA-standard 2D barcode on what?

Boarding passes: the same code works printed at home on plain paper or shown on a phone, and by the end of 2010 it had replaced magnetic stripes.

Which humor magazine ran a giant UPC on its 1978 cover, hoping to jam every computer?

Mad saw the symbol as a blot on its covers, so the first issue that had to carry one blew it up huge in protest.

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.

In the 1980s, an Arizona scientist stuck tiny barcodes on which animals to tell them apart?

Honeybees: he persuaded barcode firm Intermec to shrink a label until a bee could carry it on its back and still fly and forage.

In 1992, which honor did the first President Bush give Norman Woodland?

The National Medal of Technology was a late reward for Woodland, who never got rich from the barcode he co-invented.

IBM's UPC team had a softball pitcher hurl beanbag ashtrays over its scanner to test what?

Reading speed: each ashtray, with a code on its bottom, read correctly as it flew over, and the display won over IBM's doubting executives.

A 1992 story about the first President Bush trying a supermarket scanner made him seem what?

Out of touch with ordinary life: a report said he marveled at a checkout scanner at a grocers' convention, as if seeing one for the first time.

What made KarTrak's colored stripe labels easy for its readers to spot?

Reflective plastic: each reader flashed a beam of light at the label, and the bright bounce-back set its stripes apart from other markings nearby.

What problem helped end the KarTrak colored-stripe labels in the late 1970s?

Dirt easily fooled the system: grime and mud hid the stripes from the readers, and many labels were damaged as well.