The ink would bleed in a way that you couldn't get the quality control you needed with the bull's eye." With the rectangular code, you could set up the printer to bleed in the same direction as the lines, eliminating the problem. "But the printing caused all sorts of problems. "A bull's eye is more omnidirectional," Antonelli remembers.
#Who invented barcode code
At one point, he and Silver built a crude prototype that could read their bull's eye code using a 500-watt incandescent bulb and an oscilloscope, but it would be years before optical scanning technology and computer hardware caught up with their idea. And in between, Woodwood went to work for IBM in upstate New York, hoping Big Blue would buy into the project. Woodland and Silver filed for a patent on the idea in 1949.
#Who invented barcode full
"Only seconds later," he remembered, "I took my four fingers - they were still in the sand - and I swept them around into a full circle." "I said: 'Golly! Now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes.'" "I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason - I didn’t know - I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines," he told Smithsonian Magazine in 1999. They had burned through several ideas when Woodland started drawing in the sand on a visit to his grandparents' home on Miami Beach. Silver took the problem to Woodland - who had spent the war with the Manhattan Project at Oakridge National Laboratory, apparently as a kind of historian for the A bomb project - and the two of them went to work on a solution.
![who invented barcode who invented barcode](https://mnemosyne.umd.edu/tomcat/newsengine/articleImg/article7015.large.jpg)
It all began with another graduate student named Bernard Silver, who had overheard a supermarket exec asking a Drexel dean if he could help develop a way of encoding data onto products. So, Woodland returned to Drexel for a master's degree, and it was there the seeds were sown for his most famous idea.
![who invented barcode who invented barcode](https://image4.slideserve.com/7527097/barcode-invention-evolution-l.jpg)
As an undergraduate at Philadelphia's Drexel University, Woodland developed a new means of delivering music to elevators and he planned to build a business around it, but his father wouldn't allow it, insisting that elevator music was controlled by the mob. Woodland was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and as The New York Times detailed in its recent obituary, he liked to say that the bar code would never have happened if not for his father's deep-seeded concerns over the Atlantic City mafia. "If you were sitting around the dinner table with him," says Richard Ruby, who lived three houses down from Woodland for many years, "you could tell his mind was on something else." Another well-known invention was a disposable thermocouple affixed to a lance, known as the Silver Lance, to measure the temperature of molten steel.He was a problem solver, a man of extreme curiosity. Each day, the GS1 US estimates that five billion scans take place worldwide.īorn in Pennsylvania, Silver attended Drexel where he received his B.S.
![who invented barcode who invented barcode](https://www.barcode.ro/tutorials/barcodes/img/woodland.jpg)
Today, the barcode has many applications such as tracking shipped packages, boarding passes and luggage routing for air travel, tickets for entertainment events, store registries, patient identification in hospitals, and floor control in warehouses.
![who invented barcode who invented barcode](https://th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com/O_ORIc6mwsoiyuLig5epUd0Gg3o=/1000x750/filters:no_upscale()/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/82/41/82412cad-4780-4072-8f62-7fb13becb363/barcode.jpg)
Eventually, a rectangular barcode that was promoted by IBM was formally adopted as the Universal Product Code (UPC), some years after Silver's death from acute leukemia. They built an actual bar code reader in 1951 which could electronically read the code.īy this time, Woodland was working at IBM in hopes of pursuing their idea. The pair worked together to create a shape of concentric circles, or what became known as the "bulls eye" symbol, which served as the code to be scanned. They were prompted in their work in 1948 after Silver overheard a food chain executive asking a Drexel University dean to undertake research on automatically capturing product information at checkout.