Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Barcodes

Episode Date: July 21, 2021

In 1949, a young inventor by the name of Norman Woodland was sitting on the beach in Florida. While drawing some lines in the sand, he had an idea that would revolutionize the world of retail and logistics. In fact, his invention might be found somewhere around you or on your person at this moment. Learn more about bar codes, and the closely related Universal Product Codes, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1949, a young inventor named Norman Woodland was sitting on the beach in Florida. While drawing some lines in the sand, he had an idea that would revolutionize the world of retail and logistics. In fact, his invention might be found somewhere around you or on your person at this moment. Learn more about bar codes and the closely related universal product codes on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day and tonight. And how it shaped the world now.

Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by audible.com. My audiobook recommendation today is Grocery, the buying and selling a food in America by Michael Rulman. In a culture obsessed with food, there are often more questions and answers. Ruleman proposes that the best practices for consuming wisely could be hiding in plain sight in the aisles of your local supermarket. Using the human story of a family-run Midwestern chain, Hinen's as an anchor to this journalistic narrative, he dives into the mysterious world of supermarkets and the way in which we produce, consume, and distribute food. Grocery examines how rapidly supermarkets and our food culture have changed since the days of your friendly neighborhood grocer.

But rather than waxing nostalgic for the age of mom and pop shops, rulement seeks to understand how our food needs have shifted since the mid-20th century and how these needs mirror our cultural ones. You can get a free one-month trial to Audible and to free audiobooks by going to audibletrial.com slash everything everywhere, or by clicking on the link in the show notes. Unless you've actually been involved with inventory, at any part of the inventory chain,

you might not realize how insanely complicated managing tens of thousands of items can be. Just to put this into perspective, the average supermarket in the United States has anywhere from 15,000 to 60,000 different products for sale. By this, I don't mean individual items, but products. So 20 boxes of Lucky Charms counts as one product. For the longest time, going well into the 20th century, managing all these products was done by hand and on paper. It was slow and error prone. There was a great need for a system that could automatically read and manage inventory. The story of the modern barcode actually began way back in 1948. A student at Drexel University in Philadelphia named Bernard Silver overheard the president

of a chain of grocery stores talking to one of the deans of the college about developing a system to read product information at checkout. Silver told his friend Norman Woodland about the problem, and they began trying to come up with a solution. This was still in the days before computers were ubiquitous, so many of their solutions really didn't work. Woodland, England eventually left Drexel, but didn't give up on the project. He moved to Miami Beach to live in an apartment owned by his grandfather when he came up with the idea while drawing lines in the sand. As he described it, quote, I remember I was thinking about dots and dashes when I poked my four fingers into the sand, and for whatever reason, I didn't know, I pulled my hand towards me, and I had four lines. I said, golly, now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes. Now I have a better chance of finding the doggone thing. Then only seconds later, I took my four fingers, as they were still in the sand, and I swept them around into a circle, unquote.

The first iteration of their barcode was a circle that looked like rings on a tree. The reason for that is that it could be read in any direction, and I'll have more on that in a bit. They built a crude system with a 500-watt incandescent light bulb and an oscilloscope. They kind of sort of got it to work, but the truth was that it was an idea far ahead of its time. The fact that they came up with idea before computers were widespread and lasers were even invented is actually really impressive. They were awarded a patent in 1952, but little was done with the idea. It would be another 20 years before the idea of using barcodes really took off. The idea was waiting for technology to catch up with it. RCA eventually purchased the original

patents, but they were unable to create a marketable product. They did end up creating a prototype system in 1972, which was actually tested in a Kroger Foods in Cincinnati. But the hardest part they found was actually printing the circular labels. The barcodes we know today first took form when the National Association of Food Chains created the Ad Hoc Committee for U.S. supermarkets on a uniform grocery product code. They created the standards for the uniform product codes or UPC. These are the numbers that you can find on almost every product in the world today. The creation of these codes was a huge undertaking. Every industry has its own concerns and their own way of doing things. In 1973, the committee adopted a proposal by IBM for both the numbering and the way

the bar codes would be printed, allowing the codes to be read even if there was a printing error. Coincidentally, on the IBM team was none other than Norman Woodland, the guy who first came up with the idea back in 1949 in the sand. However, the IBM rectangular system was not the same as his circular system. On June 26, 1974, the very first purchase using a UPC code and a barcode scanner was conducted at Marcia's supermarket in Troy, Ohio. The purchase was a 10-pack of Wrigley's juicy fruit gum. Both the gum and the receipt are on display at the Smithsonian Institute. While the technology existed in 1974, it would still be a while before it went into popular use. There was a huge chicken and egg problem. While UPC codes could bring cost savings to supermarkets,

was calculated that at least 70% of the items in a supermarket had to be using UPC codes before it made sense to invest in the equipment. That meant that the industry had to adopt the codes before scanners would begin being seen at cash registers. Adoption of the barcodes really began to take off in the early 1980s when big retail chains like Kmart and Sears started using them. As more grocery stores began using barcodes, they found immediate success. not only did they experience a 1 to 2% decrease in operating costs, which is not a small amount,

considering your margins are only 1 to 2% to begin with, but the stores which adopted it also saw an increase in sales. Sales at most stores would increase slowly and top out at about 10 to 12% above what they were before barcode scanning, and the sales stayed there. When these mysterious codes started appearing on consumer products, conspiracy theories sprang up to explain them. Perhaps the biggest one, was that the barcodes were the mark of the beast from the Bible. That embedded in the barcode was the number 666. Spoiler, 666 is not embedded in the barcodes. And I think I'll have to do a future episode on the number of the beast. I should note that barcodes in general are not

exclusive to reading UPC codes, even if they are the most common form of barcodes. Barcodes can be used for a wide variety of things that are not UPC codes. FedEx has its own system that uses barcodes, and custom barcodes can be used to track everything from cargo containers to patients in a hospital. Back in the year 2000, there was a company called QCAT that created a system where newspapers could put a barcode in an article, and then readers could scan it at home to go to a website. To make this thing, they sent out free QCat barcode scanners to anyone who wanted one. Of course, people figured out immediately that you could scan anything with these, and some people, like myself, got a free QCAT scanner and used it to catalog all of their stuff.

Now, the history of the barcode is interesting, but what exactly is in a barcode? Here I'm going to go into the weeds to explain exactly why a UPC code is the way it is. If you happen to have a UPC code next to you, take it out and look at it. If you have a can or bottle of a soft drink, they will usually have one, as will most packaged products. A UPC code consists of 12 numbers. There are no other characters or letters in the code. It's just a string of 12 numbers. 11 of the numbers can be used to identify a company and a product.

So in theory, there are a maximum of 100 billion unique UPC codes which can be created. Any company that wants to create their own unique UPC code can apply to get one. The first six to nine digits are the company identifier. As there are a fixed number of digits, 12, the smaller the company number, the more room there is for products. That's why it costs more for a lower company number, and it's usually reserved for large companies that manufacture a large number of products. The remaining numbers are for products that are assigned by the company. There are 95 bar spaces in a UPC barcode.

That might surprise you because it doesn't seem that there are 95 lines. That's because the thick and thin black and white lines might be three or four lines together. The black and white lines are binary. Black lines are ones and white lines are zeros. At the bottom of the code, you'll see 12 digits. There is one digit by itself on the left, then some longer lines, then five digits, then some longer lines in the middle, then five more digits on the right,

then longer lines again, and then finally one digit by itself on the far right. The 95 lines are grouped into 15 sections. Three of the groups are called guards. They are the longer lines on the far left, the far right, and in the middle. The lengths of these lines really isn't relevant other than for formatting and separating the numbers. The guard lines tell the scanner where the boundaries of the barcode are. The right and left guard are both three digits each, and the middle guard is five digits. The remaining 12 sections represent the actual UPC numbers.

There are six numbers on the right and six numbers on the left. The left numbers always start with a zero, and the numbers on the right always start with a one. This is how a scanner can read a barcode if it's upside down. If the numbers on the left all start with a one, then the scanner knows that the code is upside down, and it reverses the numbers. For those of you knowledgeable in computers,

note that each number in a UPC code uses 7 bits, not the normal 8 bits that characters use in ASC. The reason why 11 digits are used for the company and product identification is because the rightmost number, the 12th digit, is used as a check sum. A computer can quickly run a calculation on the 11 numbers that it read and check them against that 12th number. If the number doesn't check, then it has to scan the code again. The leftmost number is a store category number. Zero is for a standard barcode. Two is for items that have to be weighed like fruit.

three is for an item from a pharmacy, and five is for coupons. What I just described is the most common UPCA code. Those are the ones on most products. There are other variants such as UPCE codes, and there's another system called the International Article Number or European Article Number. Before I end, I should note that everything I've talked about so far are called one-dimensional barcodes. They can be run in a line at any point along the barcode, even diagonally. However, because they're one-dimensional, the amount of data they can encode is limited.

There are now two-dimensional barcodes that you're probably familiar with. The most popular one is called QR codes. QR codes can encode far more information than a regular one-dimensional barcode. A QR code can encode up to 4,296 characters, including letters, numbers, and punctuation. Or it can encode 7,089 digits if you only encoded numbers. That is why you have to use something like a QR code for sharing a website URL, not a simple barcode. The last thing I'll note is that there is no information in a UPC barcode about the product itself. It's just an ID number and nothing more.

All of the information about the product, such as price, would be located in a database, which would then be associated with the UPC number. Barcodes are incredibly ubiquitous in the world today. It's estimated that every day there are 500 billion barcode scans around the world. Without the simple barcode, much of our modern economy simply wouldn't function. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson. Today's five-star review comes from listener Ricky G over at Podcast Republic. They write, I love everything about this podcast.

The entire knowledge spectrum broken down into single episodes is a stroke of genius. Thanks, Ricky G. I don't know if you hang out with other Ricky G's or if there's a Ricky G club, but if there is, could you mention the podcast of Ricky Gervase or actress Ricky Garcia or Latin recording artist Ricky G? And if there isn't a Ricky G club, maybe you should consider making it. Remember, if you leave a review, or if you just send me a question via email or social media, I may read it on the show.