The barcode is 57 years old today

The idea of ​​marking, the most suitable for machine reading, came to the minds of many people, but the first successful option was developed by two American students from the University of Drexel. In 1948, Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver heard the president of a trading company complaining about the lack of an automatic identification system for goods in their warehouses. Friends immediately thought about the simplest code - Morse code. To make the dots and dashes printed on paper more recognizable, students decided to “stretch” them up and down to get a set of vertical stripes of different thicknesses. This was the barcode now familiar to every person.

The patent was received on October 7, 1952. In this regard, after 57 years, google has changed the logo.

Coded there, of course, is the word google. The code 128 encoding is used.

For decoding the barcode I used http://zxing.org/w/decode.jspx .

A little more history:

In the same year, already working for IBM, friends tried to make a scanner for a barcode. A tube photocell from a film projector that reads a sound track from a film was taken as a detector, and a 500-watt lamp was used to illuminate the samples. The device, although it worked, was not suitable for practical use for a number of reasons, one of which was the frequent burning of paper with a too powerful lamp.

Only the invention of the laser in 1960, which made it possible to create the necessary light sources, made bar-scanners suitable for the mass market. Unfortunately, lasers fell in price only by the 70s, and two friends sold their patent in 1962, and did not receive a cent return from it.

In 1972, the Kroger chain store (Cincinnati) first tried to implement a circular bar code system. However, when printing such marking was easily smeared, and the experiment was stopped. On June 26, 1974, the first product in the world, ten packs of chewing gum, was sold through a cash register with a barcode scanner in a Troy supermarket in Ohio. By some miracle, one of them was not chewed, and now it is stored in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. In 1992, President George W. Bush awarded Norman Woodland an honorary medal for his services to the people. Unfortunately, his co-author Bernard Silver did not live up to this point, having died in 1963.