Barcode biography
The short story of the barcode is a short story of the barcode not every buyer, and the manufacturer, too, knows why the label needs a barcode. But it is used not only to make it possible to break through the price, but also to protect the goods from counterfeit. We are all so accustomed to seeing barcodes on a variety of products that we perceive them for granted.
This is a great way to personalize the label and protect products from counterfeit. Surprisingly, often even the manufacturers themselves do not know how the bar-code appeared and how it was embedded in the production of the label. And this is definitely useful and important information. Therefore, in this article we want to consider all these issues in more detail.
The appearance of a barcode in the world for the first time for the first time the idea of a modern barcode appeared in the year. The technique of its creation was proposed by American student Wallace Flint, who at that time studied at the Higher School of Economics, which works at Harvard University. Its main task was the maximum automation of trading processes.
During his activities, Flint published some theses in which he partially described the working model of the ideal supermarket of that time. According to the student’s idea, the original punch card “tied” for each product in the assortment of the supermarket. Buyers would simply choose punchards and handed them over to the manager. He scanned them with a special device, after which he received a signal to the strip conveyor, which delivered the desired product from the warehouse.
Next, the buyer received an account and paid for it, and information on the purchase was entered into the overall database of the supermarket. Unfortunately, at that time it was difficult to implement such an idea. Or rather expensive. Basically due to the high cost of reading devices. But in the year the idea again pops up to the surface. They just heard the conversation of the owner of one of the stores that it would be good to automatically read information about each product before sale.
They were interested in this and active work began. The UV blackel was originally used to label goods. But this was quite expensive, and the technology itself turned out to be unreliable. Later, a linear bar code was invented, the creation of which used the technologies of the ABC Morse and sound paths. The sequence from the points and dashes from the ABC Morse was converted into stroke lines, and to read information, the methods of voice acting movies were used, in which elements with varying degrees of transparent are converted into sound.
But later it was decided to make the code in the form of a circle so that it could be read from different positions. As a result, the final result was still far from the modern barcode. In the year, Silver and Woodland receive a patent for their invention. The first barcodes of the modern sample, the work of two inventors definitely had its fruits, simplifying the work of more than one generation of sellers and manufacturers.
And buyers also benefited from this. But the circular code was still not perfect and the work on its improvement was constantly carried out for many years. And since their idea was already patented, other inventors had to go a different way. And they walked. And Woodland also participated in this. For several years, Normann Woodland worked with George Laurer to create an alternative to an existing invention.
Together they managed to develop exactly the barcode that we see today. It received the name "Universal Product Code" and was born on April 3 of the year. So there is not even fifty years to a modern barcode. However, initially the invention was not widespread. In Western Europe, an alternative was used for a long time - the “European Article”. It was a set of numbers from 0 to 9, the number of which varied - 8 or as a result, everything came to a single denominator, and the American and European codes became compatible.
Modernity at the moment in the world exists and is actively used by more stroke coding systems. But still, four of them are most common: UPS;.