On June 26, 1974, in a shopping mall in Troy, Ohio, at 8:01 am, a ten-pack of fruit chewing gum at the checkout was scanned using linear barcodes and the world of commerce changed. forever. It was a “bar code” of the UBC type. For years they had been looking for a way to identify with certainty every single commodity. At first, in the 1930s, people tried punch cards that the first computers worked with, but they weren’t very practical. In the 1960s, a version of color coding was experimented with to identify trains but that didn’t work either. Then we began to try with the numerical codes and the technological proposal of IBM won.
Behind it was actually the intuition of an engineer, Norman Woodland, who had long been convinced of the need to create “a Morse code” for goods and had obtained the patent as early as 1949; he was then hired at IBM where he developed the whole patent went on a very long tour before becoming a product. The final version of the Universal Bar Code is also due to the contribution of a group of MIT scientists who chose the graphics and fonts so that they could last over time and also decided to add, next to the lines, the actual numbers for ensure that the system can work even if the scanner fails. The package of tires purchased on June 26, 1974 has never been discarded, it seems: it is exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington DC, In 1992 Woodland received the National Medal for Technology from President George HW Bush, and in 2011, a the year before he died, he was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame.
We are building, day after day, an Italian Innovation Almanac. Today, for example, we have not found facts related to Italy. To propose, write to me at [email protected]
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