One of the researchers for our blog spent some time in an antique store the other day. She was looking for older clocks with interesting stories. She failed to do that and punishments will commence shortly, but she was a bit off kilter when she came back to the office. Antique stores can do strange things to people. Visiting them is almost like peeking into a neighbor’s house. You’re not doing anything wrong, but you feel like you’re doing something wrong. Once someone remembers that the original owners and maybe the second or third owners of the items are probably dead, a person can get a little discomfited. I gave her a cup of coffee and asked her to talk about her experience. She said, “All of the price tags were handwritten. I stood there in this huge place and all of a sudden it hit me that there were no barcodes in the whole place. It was weird.”
I took her coffee from her. She didn’t need any more stimulants. As silly as that may seem, it brought up a good point. Barcodes are like the sound of a ticking clock: we only notice them when they’re gone. They’re everywhere. Every product bought or sold in the USA has a barcode attached to it sans antiques.
The very first thing that we would visually identify as a barcode is substantially older than we’d expect. It dates back to first century Ireland. The language Ogham looks very much like a barcode. Those with a quick eye will note that Ogham is also very reminiscent of Morse Code. Those with a quicker eye will notice that UPCs, ISBNs, ISSNs, and EANs hark back to Morse Code also. That is not a coincidence.
In 1948, Bernard Silver did something we all do, but no one wants to admit. He eavesdropped on a conversation perhaps unintentionally. He overheard a grocer talking to a dean at the Drexel Institute of Technology asking for a way to easily identify products at the checkout register. Silver contacted his friend Joe Woodland and together they created the first barcode for commercial use. The story is Woodland went to a beach to relax and silently brainstorm. The creative inventor wrote out a number in Morse Code and extended the dots and dashes into vertical lines. Silver and Woodland created a round “bull’s-eye” shaped barcode so that the product could be scanned from any direction. The US Patent Office granted their patent in 1952.
Barcodes were created by flattening Morse Code into lines.
The barcode has undergone several transformations. We no longer use round barcodes. They’re linear now, but they can still be scanned from nearly any direction and the ties to Morse Code have been warped. The biggest changes are not in what the barcodes look like, but the scanners used to read them. The first reader was a huge monstrosity of a machine that more closely resembled ENIAC than the devices we see today. To pick up the subtle differences in the width of the bars, the scanner required a 500 watt incandescent bulb and a black cloth to block out all additional light. Knowing that would take up too much valuable “candy space” in grocery store checkout lanes, they needed lasers to make the scanners viable. They didn’t have lasers. No one had lasers. Albert “has a role in this too” Einstein created the theoretical framework for lasers in the late 1910s, but no one implemented one until 1960. It seemed that grocery stores would have to wait for their barcodes.
Eventually the barcode scanners shrunk to a practical size. Eventually lasers became affordable. In 1970, the UPC (Universal Product Code) came into existence. Four years later, grocers finally got their wish and the first product bought by a consumer with a barcode was scanned in. The product was Juicy Fruit gum! (There’s a trivia question you can amaze your friends and families with.)
Wrigley's Juicy Fruit Gum was the first package with Barcodes on it!
Barcodes are everywhere now. We have them on our mail, bulk shipping boxes, and products. Some items have several barcodes on them. Companies apply for the UPCs and are given the first six digits by the GS1-US. The other digits are assigned by the company. Every product is given a unique code. Books are given ISBNs (International Standard Book Number) and monthly periodicals are given ISSNs (International Standard Serial Number). International products are given EANs (European Article Number) and products in Japan are given JANs (Japanese Article Number). If you’re a person you can get a trendy barcode tattoo. At their core, they’re all the same: thin lines and thick lines that are used to track stuff.
The “tracking stuff” part of the equation is what has some people concerned.
One type of barcode is called RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification). This is a barcode that sends out a radio signal to help track lost inventory and a whole host of other things. It was first used by the railroads to help them keep track of railcars. The concern is that if a product is tracked then essentially the person carrying the product is tracked.
Some people are concerned about the uniformity that comes along with barcodes on everything while other people are concerned about the invasion of privacy that can come along with RFID. Some people are willingly implanting RFID chips in their bodies as a protection against identity theft and as a convenient way to electronically pay for things. One can only wonder if Silver and Woodland imagined the controversy and the wide range of uses of barcodes when they literally drew lines in the sand.
Which all brings us to…the introduction of our brand new Barcode Alarm Clock !
That’s right, folks. It’s an online alarm clock made out of barcodes. It constantly updates itself, in order to display the current time. And it’s got that same, really annoying and whiny OnlineClock.net alarm sound that’s extremely effectively but that everyone still loves to hate.
Please help us celebrate uniformity, conformity, and the commercialization of the planet by using the Barcode Alarm Clock.
You know you want to.
Related Alarm Clock Blog Posts: