Barcodes are used in various industries which helps the businesses to increase their efficiency and workforce productivity, there are mainly two types of barcodes one is the linear barcodes and the other is 2D barcodes.
The idea of barcodes was first introduced by Wallace Flint in 1932 . He is the one who invented an automated checkout system for a grocery store to automatically dispensing of products using punched cards and flow racks. Bernard Silver, a student of Philadelphia’s Drexel Institute of Technology heard president of Food Fair asking one of the deans to research on a system which automatically reads product information during checkout. Then the Bernard along with his friend Norman Joseph Woodland started working on a variety of systems and their first working system is to use patterns of ink that would glow under ultraviolet light, but the system had the problems like instability of the ink besides being highly expensive.
Then Woodland left Drexel and moved to his grandfather’s apartment in Florida and continued working on it. He formed his first barcode from sand on the beach. After several months of work he came up with the linear bar code, using elements from two established technologies, movie soundtracks and Morse code. To read the data he used technology from the optical sound trackers in the movie using a 500 watt light bulb. He later decided that the system would work better if it were printed as a circle instead of a line, allowing it to be scanned in any direction.
On October 7, 1952, they were granted a patent (US Patent #2,612,994) for their “Classifying Apparatus and Method”. Philco purchased their patent in 1952, and sold it to RCA, the same year.
The above are about the early stages of barcode evolution. In the later stages, the barcode were seen to be rapidly developing and the result of this development is clearly evident today.
