A lot of people are spending part of today shivering outside of stores to get those blockbuster holiday deals.
The unsung hero of all of that fast and furious commerce? The bar code, and interestingly, it got its start far from a checkout lane.
Unlike the key elements of a bar code, this story is not a straight line.
It starts at Drexel University in Philadelphia, where a supermarket manager was asking a dean for help.
Every time someone bought groceries, a clerk had to enter each individual item into the register, no matter how long the line behind them was.
Then other clerks had to manually update the store’s inventory.
All of that took time and money, and he wanted the academics to find a way to speed things up.
Drexel student Bernard Silver overheard the request; he mentioned it to his friend Joe Woodland, who was so intrigued that he dropped out of graduate school to find a solution.
And one day, he came up with one, while hanging out at the beach.
Woodland had learned Morse Code as a Boy Scout, and he thought, what if there was a visual code that some kind of camera could read that would match a physical product with a code and a price at the cash register?
He drew a series of lines in the sand, some wide, some narrow, and then made them round, like a bullseye on a dartboard.
He and Silver got a patent for the “classifying apparatus and method” in 1952.
But a system to read their code didn’t come along for like two decades.
There was a big breakthrough in the early 1960s, when engineer David J. Collins developed a way to track freight rail cars by attaching a series of unique color bars to the side of each car, and using cameras to scan and identify each code.
Retailers and tech companies worked on similar scanning systems, and in the early 1970s, engineer George Laurer of IBM came up with the Universal Product Code that we use today.
Rather than a bullseye, there are vertical white and black lines that any store scanner can use to recognize the code and sell a product.
By the way, the first official UPC to be scanned: a 10-pack of gum at a store in Troy, Ohio, for $1.39.
If you’re in the community of Ariel, in southern Washington state, you might be marking DB Cooper Day.
Ariel is believed to be near where, in 1971, Cooper jumped out of an airplane he had hijacked, making off with four parachutes and $200,000.
So, for many years, the town held an annual get together for people who had followed the case and were trying to figure out just who the heck DB Cooper actually was.
It wasn’t me, I know that much.
Scan here: Endowed professor delves into the history of the barcode (Clemson)
A hijacker holiday in Washington (BBC)
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