The World’s First Barcode

The invention of the barcode can be traced back to the late 1940s, and while it can be seen on just about every product today, it wasn’t a commercial success until the 1980s. The first barcode didn’t look like it does today, either.

In 1948, a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia named Bernard Silver overheard a supermarket chain president asking the dean of his college to come up with a better way to speed up the checkout process at his supermarkets. While the dean didn’t act on the request, Silver thought it was an intriguing idea. He told his friend who was an inventor named Joe Woodland about the idea, and Woodland agreed to try to find a solution.

Woodland began working on the problem in 1948 and even left his graduate school to devote time to reach his goal. He came up with a solution in an unlikely place in 1949. While he was sitting on a beach in Miami, he began to think that Morse Code could be the answer. He started to poke his fingers into the sand, but instead of using dashes and dots, he drew out thick and narrow lines. He then made the lines into a circle.

Woodland joined Silver in Philadelphia and began to work on the new system Woodland had discovered in the sand in Miami. They were eventually granted a patent in 1952 for their idea. But the problem became that the technology wasn’t in place to use…