The Off-Key Bard
History

This Day in History — The Barcode Is Patented

On this day in 1952

On October 7, 1952, Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver patented the barcode concept, two decades before scanning technology caught up.

The Off-Key Bard walks into a supermarket before barcodes. Every product has to be identified and priced by hand. Changing prices means changing labels. Checkout depends on a cashier reading each item correctly.

"Then two inventors ask a deceptively simple question: What if products could identify themselves to a machine?"

On October 7, 1952, inventors Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver received U.S. Patent 2,612,994 for a "Classifying Apparatus and Method." Behind that dry title was an idea that would eventually evolve into one of the most recognizable technologies in the world: the barcode.

A Question From a Supermarket

The story had begun several years earlier at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia. In 1948, Silver overheard the president of a local grocery chain asking one of Drexel's administrators whether the school could develop a system capable of automatically identifying products during checkout. The school reportedly declined the project.

Silver didn't forget it. He told Woodland, a fellow Drexel graduate student, and the two began thinking about ways to encode product information so that a machine could recognize it automatically. The problem sounds ordinary today because scanners surround us, but in the late 1940s it required imagining an entirely new connection between printed information and electronic computing.

Woodland eventually left Drexel and spent time in Miami Beach, Florida, working on the problem. He had learned Morse code as a Boy Scout, and according to his later account, that experience provided the conceptual breakthrough.

Sitting on the beach, Woodland began drawing dots and dashes in the sand. Then he extended them downward with his fingers. The dots became thin lines. The dashes became thick ones. The basic concept of encoding information through different patterns of lines had appeared.

A Bull's-Eye, Not a Barcode

But the design Woodland and Silver patented did not look exactly like the familiar rectangular UPC barcode found on products today. Their patent described several configurations, including a striking circular "bull's-eye" pattern made from concentric rings.

The circular design addressed a practical problem: orientation. A cashier shouldn't have to position a product at precisely the correct angle for a scanner. A bull's-eye symbol could theoretically be read from almost any direction. The patent also described the use of optical equipment to illuminate and detect the encoded pattern.

The inventors filed their patent application on October 20, 1949. Nearly three years later, on October 7, 1952, the U.S. Patent Office granted it.

The idea worked. The technology needed to make it practical largely didn't exist yet.

Early scanners would have required cumbersome equipment, and reliable optical recognition was difficult. Lasers — which would eventually become extremely useful for barcode scanning — would not even be demonstrated until 1960. Computers were also enormous and expensive, making a nationwide automated supermarket checkout system unrealistic in the early 1950s.

So one of the great ironies of barcode history is that Woodland and Silver had devised a solution years before the surrounding technology was ready for it. Their patent was eventually sold to Philco, which later sold the rights to RCA. The original patent expired in the 1960s, before barcodes became ubiquitous in retail.

From Circles to Stripes

Meanwhile, the problem the pair had tried to solve wasn't going away. As supermarkets grew larger and stocked thousands of different products, retailers increasingly wanted an automated system capable of identifying merchandise, recording prices, tracking inventory, and speeding checkout.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, several companies were experimenting with competing systems. RCA pursued a version of the circular bull's-eye barcode descended from Woodland and Silver's concept.

Another approach came from IBM. Engineer George Laurer led the development of a rectangular barcode that could be printed reliably on product packaging and scanned efficiently — the circular design, it turned out, tended to smear when printed at high speed on a press, which could render it unreadable. Importantly, Woodland was also working at IBM by then and contributed his earlier expertise to the effort, working alongside Laurer and mathematician David Savir to refine the details.

In 1973, the grocery industry's Uniform Grocery Product Code Council selected the IBM design as the basis for the Universal Product Code — UPC. The familiar pattern of vertical black bars had won.

The Pack of Gum That Made History

Then came the moment that turned those lines into something consumers actually encountered.

On the morning of June 26, 1974, at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, cashier Sharon Buchanan scanned a ten-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum, purchased by shopper Clyde Dawson, who happened to be Marsh's own head of research and development. The scanner read the UPC. The register recognized the product. And a grocery item had been purchased using a UPC barcode scanner for the first time.

That little package of gum now resides in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

The transformation that followed extended far beyond making supermarket checkout faster. Barcodes allowed businesses to connect physical objects with computerized databases. A simple printed symbol could tell a computer what an object was, allowing software to retrieve everything else associated with it — price, inventory count, manufacturer, shipping information, destination, or production data.

That principle spread everywhere. Retailers used barcodes to track merchandise. Warehouses used them to manage inventory. Manufacturers used them to follow components through production. Shipping companies used them to route packages. Hospitals used them to identify medications and patients. Libraries used them to track books.

The barcode became a bridge between the physical and digital worlds.

And eventually even the barcode evolved. Traditional one-dimensional barcodes encode information primarily across a single direction. Later two-dimensional codes, including the QR code developed by Denso Wave in Japan in 1994, could store considerably more information in a compact area. Today cameras in ordinary smartphones can read those codes almost instantly.

Yet the fundamental concept remains remarkably close to the problem Woodland and Silver attacked in the 1940s: create a visual pattern that a machine can recognize and translate into information.

"From dots and dashes drawn in sand,
To lines on everything at hand.
A simple mark a machine could read —
And commerce found the code it need."

The barcode is easy to overlook precisely because it succeeded so completely. Those black lines appear on groceries, packages, books, electronics, medical supplies, and countless other objects without attracting much attention. But behind them was an idea far ahead of the equipment available to implement it.

Woodland and Silver didn't invent the supermarket scanner we recognize today, and their bull's-eye design wasn't the UPC eventually adopted by retailers. What they patented was the foundational concept of automatically identifying objects using machine-readable printed patterns.

On October 7, 1952, Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver received the patent for an invention whose time had not quite arrived. Two decades later, technology finally caught up — and the barcode quietly changed the way the world identifies, sells, ships, and tracks almost everything.

Sources

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