National Barcode Day – June 26, 2024

History of National Barcode Day

In 1932, American Wallace Flint proposed a system for automating store checkout using punched cards. Following that, Bernard Silver and Norman Joseph Woodland, a graduate student at Drexel University — formerly Drexel Institute of Technology — developed a code to fulfill Flint’s idea, and they applied for a patent on the code in 1949. North American railroads began experimenting with multicolor bar codes for tracking railcars in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the system shortly became obsolete and was replaced by a radio-based system known as Automatic Equipment Identification (A.E.I.).

The Uniform Product Code Council (U.P.C.C.) was established in 1973, and it contributed to the definition of the numerical format that comprised the Uniform Product Code. Following this development, companies in the technology sector began to provide alternatives to symbol representations. One of these variants was the one created by I.B.M.’s George J. Laurer, which incorporated a minor change to the beginning symbol. This design was eventually chosen as the alternative.

On June 26, 1974, a 10-pack of chewing gum was purchased at the Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, and went on to become the first U.P.C.-marked grocery product in American history to be scanned successfully by a barcode. To date, there is a fax of the transaction on display at the Smithsonian.