October 7 - Anniversary of the Invention of the Bar Code

Posted on October 7, 2021

Key points

This is an update of my post published on October 7, 2010:

The first patent for a bar code product was issued to Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver on this day in 1952. Actually, their identification idea wasn’t in a bar shape, but was instead a bull’s eye symbol made up of concentric circles. And the Bull’s Eye Bar Code never really caught on.

Soon our familiar bar code was used:

Bar codes contain information such as item name and price, and special scanners are used to get that information to the cash register and to the store computers. In other words, bar codes aren’t just used to quickly indicate prices at the register, but also to keep track of inventory, telling, for example, how many of each item is still on the shelves. Some systems are able to encode several thousand bytes of information.

And today we often see QR codes instead of bar codes. They carry hundreds of times the data, they can be individualized (like, each iPhone 13 can have its own individual QR code, if desired, even if they cost the same). QR codes are easier to read from various angles and are less likely to misread if there is a smudge of dirt obscuring part of the code. I imagine that there are good reasons to stick with bar codes for some uses, but QR codes are likely to become more and more popular.