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It’s survived a consumer backlash, a “death ray” laser scare and a dubious link to devilry, and yet it continues greasing the wheels of capitalist society largely unchanged since it emerged to much skepticism in the 1970s.
If you’re reading a newspaper (and we hope you are), scan your eyes to a discreet corner of your Daily Rag and look for a small rectangular box crammed with thick and thin vertical lines: if you hadn’t already guessed, you’re looking for the bar code.
Found on almost everything we purchase, it is a striking example of a technological advance that, despite its ubiquity, goes about its business workmanlike and unheralded — a ballpoint pen in a world of app-tastic digital baubles.
In 2023 it celebrated its 50th birthday, and a few lines were scribbled in congratulations. Some of the more feverish tributes even included “Bar code Fun Facts,” though consumers could be forgiven for mistaking corn flakes and inventory-taking with rampant frivolity.
Still, the bar code is not without its own colourful history.
Let’s start with Satan. In 1975 an article in a religious publication suggested bar codes were the “Mark of the Beast,” an end-of-times biblical prophecy from the Book of Revelation, and in 1982 it was claimed ‘666’ — the number of the beast — was hidden within each bar code. Others were convinced the ominous black-and-white lines would be “laser tattooed” on to our heads and hands, an early Terminator scenario.
They are “strangely dystopian,” BBC writer Chris Baraniuk argued last year in an article last year entitled The Weird History of the Bar code. But as communications professor Jordan Frith, author of the book Bar code, points out: “It’s kind of strange to imagine a bunch of grocery executives leading the way for the apocalypse.”
Barcodes as we know them debuted with the purchase of a pack of gum at a grocery store in Troy, Ohio, on June 26, 1974, though their origins date much earlier to when Norman Joseph Woodland had an epiphany while drawing lines in the sand on a Miami beach. Inspired by the dots and dashes of Morse code, he and Bernard Silver patented their bull’s-eye-shaped design in 1952.
The chewing gum got the glory in the bar code backstory, but railways in the late 1960s were the first to deploy the technology, sponsoring the KarTrak bar code system that monitored freight cars using a series of coloured bars in a ladder format read by bulky trackside readers.
Woodland and Silver’s invention, later adapted by IBM into the rectangular pattern, might have languished in what the research firm Gartner calls the “trough of disillusionment” if not for another significant benchmark in scientific history: the development of the laser, an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.
“It’s kind of strange to imagine a bunch of grocery executives leading the way for the apocalypse.”
Before 1960, when engineer Theodore H. Maiman built the first working laser, the bar code had been perilously close to becoming a “forgotten piece of history,” Frith contends. “It’s an interesting example of a technology invented before its time.”
The laser brought its own challenges: it frightened the pants off people. Reporters hungry for hot copy speculated on laser beams as weapons, giving rise to the Los Angeles Herald headline: “L.A. Man Discovers Science Fiction Death Ray.” IBM lawyers fretted about bar code scanners causing an epidemic of blindness among supermarket staff and “laser suicide.” Tests on monkeys later proved it caused no harm to the animals’ eyes.
From eye surgery to welding, the potential of lasers soon eclipsed the fears but Maiman never guessed it might revolutionize our weekly schlep to Costco. “I did not foresee the supermarket checkout scanner or the printer,” he wrote.
Even after its adoption by U.S. retailers, the bar code faced new threats from suspicious consumer advocates and labour union leaders who feared it would lead to hidden price rises and the elimination of jobs. In the summer of 1974, the Phil Donahue Show warned viewers the grocery industry would use the technology to fleece customers, and a countrywide campaign was launched to fight its spread. Editorial writers prepared obits.
The backlash subsided in the 1980s as scanner adoption rose exponentially and retail executives fought back with editorials lashing out at “local Luddites” and the “less enlightened.” Their efforts paid off: by 1989 bar codes featured in more than half of all grocery sales in the U.S. Far from the dreaded “death ray,” the laser scanner was providing hard evidence for what merchants really wanted to know — what sells and what doesn’t.
For all its quiet efficiency — an estimated 10 billion bar codes are scanned each day — the innovation failed to make anyone rich. Woodland, who died in 2012 at age 91, and Silver, who died in 1963 at age 38, sold their patent for a paltry $15,000, their only profit for helping to transform global commerce.
No two bar codes are the same, and their lines can be rearranged to register up to 10 trillion different products, but their half-century hegemony is now in danger of being usurped by QR codes, a subset of the technology that can link to infinitely more information than the seven pieces of basic data held on bar codes.
Developed in Japan in the mid-1990s, QR (Quick Response) codes had largely been written off in the West by the mid-2010s before enjoying a resurgence during the pandemic. “Very soon we will say goodbye to the old-fashioned bar code and every product will just have one QR code that holds all the information you need,” Anne Godfrey, of GS1, the global non-profit group that maintains bar code standards, told the Daily Mail.
For author and professor Firth, the bar code is more than a tool for tracking tuna sales; it’s a design icon, an enduring symbol of both capitalism and dystopian sci-fi conformity. But above all it’s humble: “The biggest testament to their success is that we never think about them.”
Something to ponder as you tear your hair out over an “unexpected item in the bagging area.”