Joyful fiftieth birthday of the UPC barcode – nobody expected it to revolutionize global trade

The first modern barcode was scanned 50 years ago this summer – on a Pack of 10 chewing gum at a food market in Troy, Ohio.

Fifty is old for many technologies, but barcodes are still popular. More than 10 billion barcodes are scanned on daily basis all over the world. And newer forms of barcode symbols, reminiscent of QR codes, have created much more uses for the technology.

I might have been like most individuals and would never have given a second thought to the easy barcode, if my research as a media scientist at Clemson University had not taken a couple of strange turns. Instead, I spent a 12 months of my life browse the archives and old newspaper articles to learn more in regards to the origins of the barcode – and eventually wrote a book in regards to the Cultural history of the barcode.

The barcode didn’t herald the tip of times, as conspiracy theorists once fearedit ushered in a brand new era in global trade.

Barcodes were an invention of the food industry

While the world has modified lots for the reason that mid-Nineteen Seventies, the Universal Product Code (UPC) – what most individuals consider once they hear the word “barcode” – has not. First scanned on a pack of gum on June 26, 1974, the code is basically an identical to the billions of barcodes scanned in stores all over the world today.

When that first UPC code was scanned, it was the culmination of years of planning by the U.S. grocery industry. In the late Nineteen Sixties, labor costs in grocery stores were rising rapidly and inventory tracking was becoming increasingly difficult. Grocery store executives hoped the barcode could help them solve each problems, they usually were ultimately right.

In the early Nineteen Seventies, the industry formed a committee that developed the UPC data standard and chosen the IBM bar code symbol over half a dozen alternative designs. Both the info standard and the IBM bar code symbol are still in use today.

Based on meeting notes I discovered in Stony Brook University Goldberg ArchivesThe designers of the UPC system believed they were doing vital work, but they’d no idea they were creating something that will long outlive most of them.

Even essentially the most optimistic estimates from the food industry were that fewer than 10,000 businesses would ever use barcodes. For this reason, the scanning of the primary UPC barcode received little attention on the time.

Some newspapers published short articles in regards to the opening ceremony, but they weren’t headlines. Their importance was only apparent years lateras barcodes became one of the vital successful digital data infrastructures of all time.

Barcodes caused a shelf revolution

Barcodes not only modified the shopping experience on the checkout, but by making products machine-readable, in addition they enabled huge improvements in inventory tracking. This meant that items that were selling well could possibly be quickly restocked when the info indicated so, requiring less shelf space for every individual product.

Barcode expert Stephen A. Brown wroteThis reduced need for shelf space allowed for brand spanking new products to spread quickly. You can blame barcodes to your food market selling 15 varieties of barely distinguishable toothpaste.

Likewise, today's giant grocery stores and supermarkets probably couldn't exist without the huge amounts of inventory data that barcode systems produce. MIT Professor Sanjay Sharma put it this fashion: “If barcodes had not been invented, the entire layout and architecture of retail would be different.”

Other industries quickly jumped on the bandwagon

The modern barcode was invented within the grocery industry, however it didn't stay confined to food market shelves for long. In the mid-Eighties, the success of the UPC system encouraged other industries to adopt barcodes. For example, inside three years, Walmart, the Department of Defense, and the U.S. automotive industry began using barcodes to trace objects in supply chains.

Private shipping corporations also used barcodes to record identification data. FedEx and UPS even developed their very own barcode symbols.

As the Sociologist Nigel Thrift explainedBy the late Nineties, barcodes were “a crucial element in the history of the new world order,” enabling rapid globalization in ways that will be hard to assume without barcodes.

Black and white and unnoticed all over the place

As someone who was so fascinated about this story that I got a tattoo of the barcode of the International Standard Book Number of my latest book On my arm, the silent passing of the barcode's fiftieth anniversary feels almost poetic.

I grew up in a world where barcodes were all over the place. They were on every product I purchased, on the concert tickets I scanned, on the packages I received.

Like most individuals, I hadn't given them much thought despite their ubiquity – or perhaps due to it. It wasn't until I started researching my book that I spotted how a barcode on a packet of chewing gum set off a sequence of events that modified the world.

For a long time, barcodes have been a workhorse operating within the background of our lives. Modern humans scan them countless times a day, but we hardly take into consideration them because they’re inconspicuous and just work – at the least more often than not.

Even though barcodes are long old-fashioned, they remind us that these seemingly boring technologies are sometimes rather more interesting and vital than most individuals realize.