Bar Code Inventor Joseph Woodland and his Creation
Retailing is more than just the goods offered for sale. It’s also about the shopper’s experience including store location, store layout, lighting….and the checkout experience. Many Boomers will remember checkout lines especially in grocery stores before the introduction of UPC (universal product code) scanners. Checkers had to look at each item, find the price and then punch the correct amount into a cash register. Checkout delays drove retailers crazy when they considered the lost profits and customer dissatisfaction.
To the rescue, a young inventor name Joe Woodland. Sitting on a Florida beach one day, he was drawing lines in the sand with his finger and realized that he could create a “Morse Code” to identify any item by varying the widths of the lines, as Morse had done with the lengths of a signal with dots and dashes. Woodland and a partner received a patent for the concept in 1952 and built a crude prototype scanner utilizing a 500-watt bulb but had to wait for a new technology introduced in 1960, the laser to make their vision a practical reality.
In 1972, the first operational UPC scanner and check stand was turned on at a Kroger Store in Cincinnati. “More check stands were installed and a comparison with other Kroger stores told an undeniable and very promising story: the bull’s-eye bar code hit the target, with superior sales figures. But this was just one store in a nationwide grocery and supermarket business worth billions. If the laser and bar code were to revolutionize the checkout counter, they would have to be near universal.”
“The History of the Bar Code” and its adoption in retail and other sectors is a worthy investment of your time to understand the circuitous path that innovation must often traverse before wide-spread adoption, and payoff, is assured.
