Who invented the barcode?

While it may appear like barcodes have been around for a long time, they didn't take off until the 1970s.

In 1948, the owner of a local food chain approached the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia to inquire about research into a system of automatically scanning product information during checkout.

Bernard Silver, a graduate student at Drexel Institute, collaborated with fellow graduate student Norman Joseph Woodland to create a solution.

Woodland was the first to suggest employing UV light-sensitive ink.

A workable prototype was developed, but it was rejected because it was too unstable and expensive.

After that, Woodland and Silver succeeded in developing a functional prototype on October 20, 1949, defining their discovery as "item classification... using the method of recognizing patterns."

Silver and Woodland created the first bar code.

On October 7, 1952, they were given a patent (US Patent #2,612,994) for their "Classifying Apparatus and Method".

Efforts to create a functional system accelerated in the 1960s.

See more: https://barcodelive.org/when-w....ere-bar-codes-invent