The weird history of the barcode
Published 1:28 PM Oct. 20, 2024
Few people think twice about barcodes, but in the 75 years since they were first dreamed up, they have helped save lives, gone into space and stoked fears of the Antichrist.
Lasers. That's what supermarket staff need, insisted Paul McEnroe. Scanners in the checkout and little pistol-shaped laser guns, too. Point, shoot, sell!
In 1969, it was an outlandish vision of the future: these lasers would scan weird little black-and-white markings on products that McEnroe and his colleagues at IBM had designed. It would speed up supermarket queues, he enthused. The solution would come to be known as the barcode.
At this point in history barcodes had never been used commercially – though the idea had been brewing for decades following a patent filed on 20 October 1949 by one of the engineers who was now part of McEnroe's team. The IBM engineers were trying to bring barcodes to life. They had a vision of the future where shoppers whizzed through the checkout with lasers scanning every item they wanted to purchase. But IBM's lawyers had a problem with the future.
"No way," they said, according to McEnroe, a now-retired engineer. Their fear was "laser suicide". What if people intentionally injured their eyes with the scanners and then sued IBM? What if supermarket staff went blind?
No, no, this was a mere half-milliwatt laser beam, McEnroe tried to explain. There was 12,000 times more energy in a 60-watt lightbulb. His pleas fell flat. And so he turned to Rhesus monkeys imported from Africa, though now he can't remember how many. "I think it was six," he says. "I couldn't swear to that." After tests at a nearby laboratory proved that exposure to the tiny laser did not harm the animals' eyes, the lawyers relented.
And that is how the scanning of barcodes became commonplace in supermarkets across the US, and ultimately the entire world.
Barcodes have always upset some people. To a fanatical few, they are nothing short of evil
In an unexpected twist, the laboratory used by McEnroe subsequently told him it would be sending him the monkeys. They were his problem now. "It was crazy," he recalls, laughing. "I found a zoo in North Carolina."
Alongside the monkeys, each human member of McEnroe's team at IBM also deserves credit for the Universal Product Code (UPC), as their version of the barcode became formally known. Among their number was Joe Woodland, the engineer who dreamed up the early concept behind barcodes decades earlier, after drawing lines in the sand on a beach. It was he and another engineer who made the application to patent the fundamental idea for barcodes back in October 1949.
Crucially, George Laurer and other members of the IBM team then took this pre-existing proposal for barcode-style markings and developed them into a neat rectangle of black, vertical lines corresponding to a number that could uniquely identify any supermarket item imaginable. From tins of soup to boxes of cereal or packets of spaghetti. The grocery industry formally adopted the UPC in 1973 and the first product bearing one was scanned at Marsh Supermarket in Ohio in 1974. From there, it conquered the planet.