Google celebrates the bar code today

Google's home page today

Google is celebrating the 57th anniversary of the bar code through a new logo on its homepage. American inventors Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver were awarded patent number 2,612,994 for a set of concentric circles. 

It all began when Bernard Silver, a graduate student at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, overheard a food chain manager asking one of the institute's deans to design a system for reading product data automatically. After trying various methods including ultraviolet ink, Silver and Woodland came up with the linear bar code.  They later replaced the lines with circles to enable scanning from any angle. In 1970 the familiar Universal Product Code (UPC) design, still used around the world, was agreed on as an industry standard.  On June 26, 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. It was the first commercial appearance of the UPC.  This was the very first item to be scanned using UPC.  Neither inventor made millions on the bar code because they sold the patent too early. Silver never found out how successful the bar code ultimately became, as he died early in a car crash. 

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