The bar code has become a completely ubiquitous technology (there are more than 6 billion bar codes scanned every day) and yet it very nearly didn’t happen at all. When it did happen it could so easily have been completely different than how it ended up. I’m a sucker for a good invention tale so I loved this story from Steven Vass about how it came about and why we nearly ended up with bar codes shaped like a bulls eye. It tells us a lot about how innovation happens so I’ve drawn out a few of the most compelling lessons:
- Pay attention – inspiration can come from anywhere: it began in 1948 when a graduate student overheard the President of a local grocery chain asking a college dean to look into a system for reading product information at the checkout. The student thought it was an interesting challenge and decided to work on it with his friend. They were inspired by morse code.
- Basic prototypes work: the first bar code was made with thin and thick lines created with sand from the beach, and could be read with a tool hacked together from a light bulb shining through paper onto a photomultiplier tube. It was primitive but worked well enough to show that it could work.
- Value can be slow to emerge: one of the student inventors, Joseph Woodland, patented the idea as a series of concentric circles rather than a series of lines (like a bulls eye). He went to work at IBM and tried for years to get them interested in the technology, and eventually sold the patent in the early 60s.
- Innovations often require other enabling technologies: the bar code really started to take off when lasers were invented which could be adapted to read the codes.
- There can often be false starts: the first official bar code system was actually developed for railway operators to identify rail cars as they went past scanners. Unfortunately it didn’t work well enough and was dropped in the 1970s.
- Standardisation helps scalability: in the late 60s a number of pilot projects were run by grocery stores to test the viability of bar codes as a way to record product information but many of them used different bar code shapes and symbols (suns, fans, circles). Interestingly IBM were by now heavily involved and were the originators of the lined rectangular bar code. In the early 70s the grocery industry set up a committee to formulate an industry-wide data and symbol standard. The true value of the invention could only be realised if everyone used the same standard. Ironically, Woodland ended up advocating for IBM’s symbol rather than the ‘bulls eye’ bar code which he had invented. Amazingly, the standards which the committee developed are still in use today.
It’s a compelling story from one of the most ubiquitous of modern technologies, but one which tells us a lot about the ups, downs, hazards and growing pains of innovation.
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Image by toguro – Own work, CC0
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