Lasers. That’s what supermarket staff need, insisted Paul McEnroe. Scanners in the boxes and small pistol-shaped laser guns.
Aim, shoot and sell!
In 1969, it was an extravagant vision of the future: These lasers would scan strange black-and-white markings on products that McEnroe and his IBM colleagues had designed.
He got excited and said they would speed up the lines at supermarkets.
The solution would later be known as barcoding.
At that point in history, barcodes had never been used commercially, although the idea had been brewing for decades following a patent filed on October 20, 1949 by an engineer who became part of McEnroe’s team.
IBM experts were trying to make barcodes a reality.
They had a vision of the future in which shoppers would zip through the register with lasers scanning every item they wanted to buy.
But IBM’s lawyers had a problem with the future.
“No way,” they said, according to McEnroe, a now-retired engineer.
They feared “suicide by laser”.
What if people intentionally injured their eyes with scanners and then sued IBM?
Or if the supermarket staff went blind?
No, no, it was a simple half-milliwatt laser beam, McEnroe tried to explain. There was 12,000 times more energy in a 60-watt light bulb.
His pleas fell on deaf ears, so he turned to a handful of rhesus monkeys imported from Africa.
After tests at a nearby laboratory showed that exposure to the tiny laser did not harm the animals’ eyes, the lawyers relented.
And that’s how barcode scanning became commonplace in supermarkets around the world.
In addition to the monkeys, each human member of McEnroe’s team at IBM also deserves credit for the Universal Product Code (UPC), as his version of the barcode was formally known.
Among them was Joe Woodland, who came up with the initial concept of barcodes decades earlier after drawing lines in the sand on a beach.
Crucially, George Laurer and other members of the IBM team took this pre-existing barcode-style proposal and developed it into a an ordered rectangle of black vertical lines corresponding to a number which can uniquely identify any supermarket item imaginable.
The food industry formally adopted the UPC in 1973, and the first product carrying it was scanned at the Marsh supermarket in Ohio in 1974.
From there, he conquered the planet.
Other types of barcodes soon appeared, and the UPC laid the foundation for so-called “2D barcodes,” such as QR codes, which can encode even more information.
But the history of these small black and white brands is much crazier and more eventful than one could imagine.
Measuring space
One could even argue that it all started with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
“I scanned things for the CIA,” McEnroe explains. “Huge maps.”
It was one of his first jobs at IBM, and it prepared him to work on an entirely new, but related, technology that would revolutionize the retail industry.
McEnroe knew that store checkout lines would move much faster if staff could scan products into a computer instead of having to read the prices stamped on each item and then process the sale manually.
To be accepted, such a code scanning system it would have to work all the time and read the code correctly even if the product was passed through the scanner at speeds of up to 2.5 meters per second.
The IBM team set to work based on the design patented by Woodland and his colleague, but with one important difference: the original approach was based on reading the thickness of the black lines.
The IBM team found that it was easier to base the scanning process not on measuring the thickness of those vertical lines, but on the distance between the edge of one line and the edge of the next.
In other words, the space between the lines, which was more reflective and easier to detect by the scanner.
That way, it didn’t matter if the label printer drew thicker lines than intended: scanning would still work, pretty much every time.
The incarnation of evil
McEnroe emphasizes that The launch of UPC barcode technology was not without controversy.
“Our first store never opened,” he recalls.
There were people outside protesting because the prices would no longer be stamped on each product, but only on the shelves where they were placed.
Some unions at the time thought – ultimately rightly – that scanning technology threatened jobs in supermarkets.
There were also concerns that barcodes could be used to hide prices.
These reluctances soon dissipated, but barcodes always continued to worry some people.
To a few fanatics, they are nothing less than evil.
In 2023, Jordan Frith, a communications professor at Clemson University in South Carolina, published a book on the history of barcodes.
During his research, he found a 1975 article in a publication called Gospel Call which pointed out that Barcodes could be “the Mark of the Beast”a reference to a biblical prophecy from the Book of Revelation about the end of the world.
The New Testament passage refers to a beast, sometimes interpreted as the Antichrist, who forces all people to be marked on the right hand or forehead.
In the prophecy, only those who accept such a mark can buy or sell.
The 1975 article indicated that, over time, barcodes would be “laser tattooed” on everyone’s forehead or the back of their hand, ready to be presented at supermarket checkouts.
Strange as it may seem, the idea has proven to be surprisingly catchy.
A 1982 book titled The New Money System (“The New Monetary System”), by evangelical writer Mary Stewart Relfe, further popularized the supposed connection, claiming that the number 666 was “hidden” between the end and middle lines of each barcode.
In fact, these “guard lines,” as they are known, serve as a reference point to help the laser scanner identify the start and end of each UPC sequence.
The IBM team’s Laurer, considered co-inventor of the UPC, later insisted that there was nothing sinister about this and that the resemblance to the pattern used to encode the number six was a coincidence.
But this strange theory can still be found in some corners of the internet.
Some even go to extreme measures to avoid barcodesincluding members of a Russian Orthodox Christian group known as the Old Believers.
One of them, Agafia Lykov, told journalists at Vice magazine in 2013 that barcodes were “the hallmark of the Antichrist.”
He added that if they gave him something with a barcode, he would remove the contents and burn the package.
In 2014, a Russian dairy company explained on its website why there was a red cross printed over the barcodes on its milk containers.
As is “well known,” the statement said, barcodes are the Mark of the Beast. The statement has been removed.
Dystopians
“It’s a little strange to imagine a group of supermarket executives leading the way to the apocalypse,” says Frith.
However, you could say that barcodes have a dystopian feel.
For some, they have become symbols of capitalism in its coldest form..
They also often appear in chilling sequences in movies.
In “Terminator” we learn that prisoners of killer robots in an apocalyptic future are given barcode markings on their arms for identification.
“This is recorded by a laser scanner,” time-traveling protagonist Kyle Reese explains to a terrified Sarah Connor.
“Some of us were kept alive to work, carrying corpses.”
The barcode marking, in this context, has echoes of the numbers tattooed on the arms of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.
In real life, they have sometimes been used maliciouslyespecially when it comes to QR codes, which instead of using vertical lines consist of constellations of small black and white squares in a pattern that can be read with smartphone cameras.
Because, for example, scanning a QR code with your phone can direct the device to a malicious website, hackers have sometimes used QR codes.
Ubiquitous
Despite some nefarious uses of barcodes and outlandish claims that they represent the Mark of the Beast, this technology is used today in thousands of industrial and commercial processes around the world.
An estimated 10 billion barcodes are scanned globally every day.according to GS1, the organization that oversees UPC and QR code standards.
And because they help retailers keep track of huge inventories of products, they allow giant businesses to operate with relatively few staff.
Erin Temmen, account manager at labeling company Electronic Imaging Materials, agrees.
His company, like others in the industry, produces barcode labels that work in virtually any environment.
This includes, for example, cold-resistant labels that do not fall off equipment filled with liquid nitrogen and chemical-resistant labels that retain the code even if splashed with harmful substances in a laboratory.
It also produces more reflective barcode labels, to increase scanning distance up to 14 metres, making them detectable even if an item is high on a shelf.
That versatility is an indication of the wide variety of contexts in which barcodes are actually used.
They have helped track the behavior and movement of bees and songbirdshave marked eggs and embryos in fertility clinics to avoid confusion and have been placed on tombstones to direct visitors to online memorials for the deceased.
The US military uses them to monitor attendance and training of personnel. A university in Saudi Arabia, to record student attendance at classes.
barcodes they have gone to space.
On the International Space Station they are used to record astronauts’ food and drink intake, as well as to identify their blood, saliva and urine samples.
On Earth, hospitals use barcode systems to track blood samples, medications and medical devices such as hip replacements.
Machine-assisted identification can help staff ensure that doctors give the right medication to the right patient, for example.
“I speak to doctors and hospital staff responsible for inventory management and they all say they have seen benefits,” says Professor Valentina Lichtner of the University of Leeds, who is researching the impact of code tracking systems. of bars in healthcare environments.
None of this would have been possible without the lines Woodland drew in the sand and the work of McEnroe and his team at IBM.
Frith believes that the seemingly simple technology of traditional barcoding will likely be around for a long time.
Despite being everywhere, “the biggest proof of their success,” says Frith, “is that we never think about them.”.
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