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History:
Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver developed the idea for the
barcode. Woodland and Silver filed US patent 2,612,994 on October 20,
1949 for "Classifying Apparatus and Method. They were issued the
patent on October 7, 1952.
Woodland who was an IBM employee and Silver built the first barcode
reader in 1952. This first prototype used a 500-watt light bulb
and a RCA photo multiplier vacuum tube. This device was not practical
nor was it commercially produced. Woodland and Silver, sold the patent
to Phil co in 1962, which later sold the patent to RCA. In 1960,
the invention of the laser permitted barcode readers to be manufactured
inexpensively, and the integrated circuit made decoding the barcode
practical.
A Kroger store in Cincinnati tested the bull's-eye barcode reader in
1972, with help from RCA. The bulls-eye barcodes were not successful. On
April 3, 1973, Woodland at IBM developed the linear barcode, which was
adopted as the Universal Product Code, or UPC. History was made on June
26, 1974, when a pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum became the
first retail product sold using a barcode reader. This historical
event occurred at Marsh's supermarket in Troy, Ohio. This very pack of
gum can be seen at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American
History.
President George H. W. Bush awarded the National Medal of Technology to
Woodland in 1992.
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