History of the UPC Bar Code on 35th Anniversary

The UPC Code is celebrating it's 35th anniversary this month and everyone is remembering barcode history with stories from the grocery store - but that's only one aspect of the uses for the ubiquitous little database address. All the UPC was ever intended to be is simply a code which returns basic information attached to that code when scanned. In the case of the UPC symbol - an item name and a price - this is the function which is getting the most attention as UPC codes reach 35 years old.

UPC bar codes simply store grocery item names and prices.

Here's a condensed rundown drawn from the Wikipedia page on Barcodes.

• Wallace Flint began it all in 1932 while at Harvard University with a grand concept of catalog warehouse automated sorting of products for delivery to customers, but the great depression kept the expensive project from getting off the ground.
• Bernard Silver at the Drexel Institute of Technology began a project with friends Norman Joseph Woodland and Jordin Johanson that used ultraviolet inks, but those faded and were expensive.
• Woodland and Johanson moved on with the idea extending it to incorporate stretched Morse Code dots and dashes as an optically scannable strip - but later switched the idea to use a circular pattern.
• Woodland and Johanson filed a patent application on 20 October 1949
• The pair attempted to interest IBM in the process, but nothing was ever done to move forward on the concept. Patent US Patent 2,612,994 was granted three years later in 1952
• In 1952 Philco purchased their patent, and later sold it to RCA.
• A new contributor named David Collins began work on a system to identify rail cars in 1959 while working at Sylvania.
• Pet food manufacturer Kal Kan requested a labeling system from Sylvania for pet food inventory control and this attracted interest from the grocery industry.
• Collins left Sylvania and formed "Computer Identics" which worked on various refinements to the bar code and types of readers.
• Computer Identics installed two systems, one at General Motors manufacturing in Pontiac Michigan, used to identify car axles produced in the plant.
• In 1966 following a grocery industry meeting RCA, who had purchased rights to the original Woodland patent, set up an internal project to develop a system based on the bullseye code.
• In mid 1970 the National Association of Food Chains (NAFC) sent a contract to develop a grocery bar code labeling system to Singer, National Cash Register (NCR), Litton Industries, RCA, Pitney-Bowes, IBM and many others.
• RCA owned the patent but IBM employed one of the original the inventors, Norman Woodland. They set Woodland up to develop their version.
• On 3 April 1973 the IBM UPC code was selected by NAFC as their standard
• NCR installed a testbed system at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, near the factory that was producing the equipment.
• On 26 June 1974, Clyde Dawson pulled a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum out of his basket and it was scanned by Sharon Buchanan at 8:01 am.
• The pack of gum and the receipt are now on display in the Smithsonian Institution.

There are several other barcode types, including the most commonly used Code 39, EAN13 and UCC128.