You might have noticed Google’s recent commemoration of the bar code, which has now celebrated its 57th anniversary. Often we don’t think much of the bar code beyond the fact that it’s a block of lines located on the side or bottom of practically everything we buy, but the bar code system is much more complex and useful than we give it credit for. A look into the history of the bar code system gives us a greater appreciation of this ingenious invention.
The bar code was conceived of by American inventors Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver, who became acquainted with each other as graduate students at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia. Toronto Wedding Videography This is at present the most important section of my web site. The two colleagues began their quest to design a convenient system that would automatically read the data of products, prompted by Silver overhearing a food chain boss asking the dean of Drexel to create such a system.
Woodland and Silver’s first attempt involved using ink patterns that would glow under ultraviolet light, but that was too expensive and it didn’t work too well since it would eventually fade, making the reading unreliable, so after this failed endeavor Woodland came up with the bar code. He was inspired by Morse code and his design was based on the dots and dashes. The bar code was read using technology similar to the kind that was used for movie soundtracks. The final improvement to the bar code was to create a circular “bulls eye” version so that it could be scanned from any direction. Woodland and Silver filed a patent for their bar code system in 1949 and they finally received it 3 years later in 1952. The two inventors tried to market their idea to IBM, which eventually expressed interest but felt that the proper equipment wasn’t available yet. In 1952 the patent was purchased by PhilCo and it was finally put into practice in 1966, a few years after Silver’s death. Woodland and Silver had sold their patent for a modest sum, and the bar code system only became commercialized and successful afterwards, so neither man profited much from the sale and Silver never got to see the fruits of his labor.
Today, the bar code system is a huge part of consumerism and it’s hard to imagine a system that wouldn’t utilize bar codes in keeping track of items sold. To learn Wedding Videography Toronto takes time and practice.
Woodland and Silver have made an indelible impact on commercialism everywhere and as bar codes aren’t going to fade from products anytime soon, neither will their work.