99% Invisible - 108- Barcodes

Episode Date: April 2, 2014

When George Laurer goes to the grocery store, he doesn’t tell the check-out people that he invented the barcode, but his wife used to point it out. “My husband here’s the one who invented that barcode,” she’d occasionally say. And … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. This sound is unmistakable. Maybe you find it kind of lulling like I do since it signifies the end of a trip to the grocery store. You've found all the things on your list and now you get to just stand there and zone out for a second or flip through a passive magazine while the checkout person does the work. That's our new producer, Katie Mangle. I myself find that sound a bit anxiety inducing since it's also the sound of the total that I'm going to have to pay, going up and up and up and up.

When I go to the grocery store and check out, I'm utterly amazed at how well the skaters can read barcodes. No, I don't tell the checkout people, my wife always did. My husband here is the one that invented that barcode, and they just kind of look at just as if to say, yeah, I believe that. Of course, today, they would look at you as if to say, you mean there was a time they didn't have a barcode? It's hard to imagine now, a world without barcodes, a world without George Laura.

Well, hello. I'm George J. Laura. I'm the one that invented the UPC bar, and symbol in 1973. Now, some of you might be saying to yourselves, I thought Joseph Woodland invented the barcode. And if you're saying that to yourself, you are a nerd, and I love you for it. And just hold your nerd horses because we're getting

to Woodland right now. It started the way a lot of things start with people trying to make more money. The grocery business decided that they needed some way to reduce their overhead. One of the main places they felt they were losing money was the checkout line. They came up with the idea of having some kind of a scannable code. Which would move people more quickly through the line. One of the first people that started working on it was an engineer named Joseph Woodland. After working on the Manhattan Project, Woodland moved on to develop an innovative way to produce

elevator music. He was jamming on this project probably set to make a whole bunch of money until, and this is according to Woodland's New York Times obituary, his father forbid him from getting into the industry because it was controlled by the mob. So Woodland moved on from elevator music to barcodes. He was trying to come up with a symbol that when scanned would translate to a series of numbers that a computer could use to identify a product. So one day he's sitting on the beach in Miami, Florida. So the legend goes.

And Woodland's thinking about his days and the boy scouts and Morse code. As one tends to do on the beach. And he's kind of absent-mindedly drawing in the sand with his fingers. When suddenly he looks down and he's got it. He's dragged his four fingers through the sand in the shape of concentric circles. Instead of dot dot dot dash dash dash he thinks I can use skinny and wide lines. Bullseye. Bullseye.

The very first barcodes were in the shape of a bullseye. Actually, they didn't call them barcodes yet. Woodland's invention was called a classifying apparatus and method. I'm really glad that we don't call them that anymore. That was 1948, and then for about 20 years, the bullseye idea gathered dust. The scanners and other equipment needed to put the system in place were just too expensive for any of it to be feasible. Fast forward to 1973. The technology is now a bit more affordable and a group of

supermarket executives led by a guy named Alan Haberman are like, okay, barcode or bust, we're doing this. By that time there were a few other designs out there, but none were perfect. So they put together a list of qualities that their ideal barcode would have and asked 14 different companies to come up with a proposal. It could be no larger than one and a half square inches. How to have a good enough depth of field that could read about a foot and a half above the scanner. How to be omnidirectional. That's George Laura again. He was working at IBM at the time, which was one of the companies competing to make the best barcode. And most people thought that a circular design like Woodlands would probably work best because of the way the scanners worked.

And those days, just about every scanner was a single line. And you can just picture that if you had a single line and it was going in the direction of the bar, it would not read all the bars. Woodlands' original circular design solved And you can just picture that if you had a single line and it was going in the direction of the bar, it would not read all the bars. Woodland's original circular design solved this because it could be read from any direction. That meant the checkout person didn't have to take your bag of cheetos and turn it in just the right way before it could pass over the scanner.

But George didn't think the bulls-eye symbol would work. I couldn't support that as the solution to what the grocery industry wanted. Because to me, there was no way that it would fulfill their specifications. My integrity just would not let me come up with a bunch of bull. So George went back to the drawing table. My wife said I came back and I would work on it day and night. Come back at night and again most of us was thinking arithmetic, trying to prove that this would work. Also I have to admit I I had a disprove that some of the others wouldn't work. He ultimately came up with a rectangular barcode that fit more code into less space, which was crucial since grocery manufacturers were already grumbling about having to make room

for this new symbol on their packaging. But there was still the issue of the one-line scanner. Somehow, we got the idea that if we used an X for the scan pattern, which could be developed very easily with a pair of mirrors, then the barcode could be read by the scanner in a matter of which way it was oriented as it passed. So even though Woodland came up with the original idea of using lines of various widths. George Lourer did more than just change that shape from a circle to a rectangle. He improved on the symbol, the code behind the symbol, and the scanners that read the symbol. Even Joe Woodland thought so.

Joe Woodland was very enthusiastic. He worked with me. In fact, he wrote the actual proposal for the submission to the grocery industry, but it was my invention of the particular symbol and barcode that we see today. The Symbol Selection Committee unanimously voted for George Luror's rectangular symbol and code. They called it the Universal Product Code, or UPC, and a year later, in 1974, a pack of Riggley's chewing gum became the first item to ever be scanned with the UPC bar code. If barcodes hadn't been invented, the entire layout and architecture of commerce would have been different. The impacts are very difficult to overestimate.

My name is Sanjay Sarma. I'm a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. Sanjay Sarma has also worked with an organization called GS1. That stands for Global Standards 1. And if you need a barcode on your product, you have to go through GS1 to get it. Imagine if Telfer numbers were standardized, right? And you didn't have any codes and two people could have the same phone number, you know, you need standards.

When barcodes became the standard, they didn't just make check out lines faster. They allowed stores to keep track of huge amounts of inventory and to collect data on what we were buying. Data they could use to keep us coming back for more without barcodes. As super stores might not exist, but equally, you know, a small store might need more employees to run it. It's like the grease that makes the machine run. That's one of the key elements of efficiency in our capitalist system.

And when you put it like that, you can see why for some people, the barcode has come to represent everything they hate about capitalism and consumerism. You can get rap candies of every kind. Bubble gum, lollipops, fun-sized candy bars, just $1.89. When I was a punk kid, if a band's album had a barcode on it, we knew they were a complete sell-outs. It ain't the barcode's fault, but it's become the symbol or the glyph of technology where afraid of or don't understand or being a cog in a wheel in a larger monolithic machine, the matrix, if you will.

Oh, I will, Jerry Whiting. My name is Jerry Whiting. I am the founder of Azealia Software here in Seattle, Washington. I've been writing software that prints spark codes for 25 years now. They aren't bad, they aren't good, they're just tools, but most people look at them and don't even know where to start. So let's demystify for a minute and look at what's inside the barcode.

Again, what we're talking about here is the UPC barcode that George Lourer invented. This is the barcode that you and I and everyone in the world has had the most interaction with. The UPC barcode is divided into two halves. It's actually two barcodes sitting right next to each other. You can see this visually because there are these longer bars that come down in the middle and on each side. Those are called the guard bars. The guard bars tell the scanner that the code is starting and ending. The left half of the barcode tells you who the manufacturer is, and the right half tells you which particular product it is. And this was something I didn't realize.

The scanner is reading both the white and the dark lines. To understand the scanner, just consider yourself in a dark room where the wall behind you has bars painted on it. And you took a flashlight and shined it over your head across the bars. You would see the room get a little lighter when you were over the white bars and it would get dark when it was over the dark bars. Black lines that don't reflect the laser light back to the scanner register as a one. white lines equal zero. There are actually 95 evenly spaced columns on a UPC barcode. A thick black line is actually a bunch of ones right next to each other.

The computer adds all that together and you get a string of 12 numbers. This number goes to the computer. The computer now looks up in its table to get the information, such as what is the product, how much they're charging for it, but that is not in the barcode. The only thing that's in the barcode is where the computer should look. This number is also printed below the barcode just in case the scanner isn't working, which for me really makes the whole mystery a little anti-climactic. I mean, it's right there. So when most people until recently thought of barcodes they thought of something that was a combination of bars and stripes. More recently two

dimensional barcodes which are they look like crossword puzzles have emerged the most popular being QR bar codes, quick response, that are scanned by cell phones. We've all seen these, and maybe a few of us have actually bothered to pull out our cell phones and download the app required to scan them. Yeah, there's something about them that I find kind of lame or annoying. You know, it's like no, Chili's. I don't want more info on the Blooming Onion.

Well, if you did, you might know that the Blooming Onion is from Outback. So anyway, I googled why are QR codes lame? And I got a bunch of articles basically saying they're actually really useful. They're just being misused. Mostly by advertisers, we've just started slapping them on every single thing. But Jerry Whiting, he still believes in them. The nice thing about QR barcodes is they are not just a lookup number to an external database. Yes, it can be a chunk of text.

It can be a URL. It can be a whole lot of different things. But there is no central authority that tells you what or how to do anything. Meaning you don't have to go through GS1 to get a QR code, which lets people do stuff like make a giant picture of Amy Goodman's face entirely out of QR codes. This is my QR code, Amy Goodman Portrait, made with 2,304 unique QR codes that link to nine years of democracy now videos.

Besides the QR code, Laura and Woodland's original barcodes have spawned a bunch of other barcodes. They're used for all sorts of things. There's code 128, which is mostly used for packaging and shipping. There's PostNet, which is used by the Post Office to sort mail. There are barcodes that use radio frequencies to send out data. They're called RFID tags, and they aren't really barcodes at all. They just get put in the same category because like barcodes, they're being used to keep track of inventory. With a grocery cart full of RFID tagged items, one could conceivably wheel their cart through

a big hoop that would read all the contents all at once, basically eliminating the checkout line entirely and allowing more people to pass through stores even more quickly so that we can all buy more stuff. Barcoads help us keep track of prescriptions, library books, luggage, endangered animals. There are so many barcodes on so many things that according to Jerry Whiting, when future archeologists come across remnants of our backward-ass civilization

and they stumble across a barcode, they're going to sign it religious significance if they don't understand the supply chain. We had no idea how far it was going to go. We thought it would stay just within the grocery industry. But of course, it didn't just stay in the grocery industry. It actually went way beyond that, all the way, to conspiracy. There is in fact a silly conspiracy theory that all barcodes have the number of the beast 6666 encoded into them. Yeah, it has to do with those guard bars that come

at the beginning, middle, and end of every bar code. And it's basically true that there are three sixes coded into the guard bars. The answer to why is a bit technical. You can read about it on George Laura's personal website in the FAQ section, if you want. But as Exhibit B, I submit George himself. Well, hello. I'm George J. Laura. After we were done with our interview, he was talking a little bit more about his job at IBM.

And then when I'd come home at night, I'd go, oh, I had a tough day. Well, my poor wife would stay and care for kids. And then he started talking about his wife and his kids. She had the hard job, believe it, she gave up her career, which was a teaching career in order to take care of the kids. And believe me, we are so proud of those kids. Really, they are, you just couldn't answer for better kids.

And this is because my wife spent her career raising those kids. I'm just so lucky. So I don't know. Does that sound like a Satan worshiper to you guys? My daughter has a bachelor's degree. 99% invisible was produced this week by Kaby Mingle with Sam Greenspan, Avery Trouffleman, and me Roman Wars. Special thanks to Jenny Morgan for production help. We are a project of 91.7 Local Public Radio KALW in San Francisco and produced of the offices of Arksign, an architecture firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. Our younger son has a PhD from state.

You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. We all tweet. You can find us. We have a Tumblr. It's fantastic. But if you want to link to George Luror's self-published autobiography called Engineering was fun. Explomation point. Go to 99pi.org.

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