Cold Open

It’s 8:00 AM, on June 26th, 1974, at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio.

Clyde Dawson, head of research and development for the grocery chain, walks through the store with a basket full of products.

There is a reason why Clyde is shopping at this particular location this morning. It’s been carefully selected for its close proximity to the city of Dayton, home of National Cash Register, or NCR, the company which designed the checkout counter used in the store. Clyde is planning to test a new technology he hopes will revolutionize the retail industry.

Clyde approaches the counter, where a small crowd has gathered. He reaches into his basket and pulls out a multi-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum and hands it to the cashier. He's chosen this item for its size, as a way to demonstrate that the technology his company is planning to adopt can work on even the smallest of products.

The cashier takes the pack of gum from Clyde and moves it over a special screen in the countertop. This scans a “barcode”, the Universal Product Code, or UPC, that has been printed on the packaging of the chewing gum. The cash register reads the barcode and pops up a price of 67 cents.

The small crowd around the counter cheers. It may not seem like much, but a new era in shopping has just begun.

It will be many years before the UPC barcode becomes widely adopted in retail. But that moment in the grocery store in Ohio is still a watershed for the two men who first started developing the technology 26 years earlier. Joe Woodland and Bob Silver were students at Drexel University in Philadelphia when they came up with the idea. Little did they know that their invention would revolutionize the way products are bought and sold. Shopping would never be the same again after the first UPC barcode was scanned in a store on June 26th, 1974.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is June 26th, 1974: The First UPC Barcode.

Act One

It’s 1947 in Philadelphia, 27 years before Clyde Dawson buys his pack of gum.

In a lab on the campus of the Drexel Institute of Technology, a grad student named Joe Woodland is busy tinkering. An aspiring inventor, Woodland hopes he can create something that will make a lasting impact on society and cement his legacy for future generations. But he's yet to achieve a breakthrough and is growing frustrated.

As he hovers over his desk, Joe is interrupted by a fellow grad student Bob Silver. Bob is excited as he tells Joe about an interesting conversation he’s just overheard between the manager of a grocery store and a dean at the college. It doesn’t sound that promising to Joe, but Bob insists that he just needs to listen.

Bob tells Joe that the manager approached the dean complaining about the problems he’s been having in his stores. Retailers at this time have no effective way of tracking inventory. Store managers can either look for empty spots on the shelves or conduct a labor-intensive inventory during overnight downtime. Mostly though, they just guess and this lack of information makes it difficult for stores to run efficient supply chains.

But inventory management was not the only problem the grocery store manager was complaining about. His clerks have laborious task of putting individual price stickers on nearly every item in the store. Then when customers check out, those price tags must be read and entered into the cash register. It’s an arduous process for the clerks and no better for the customers who have to stand around waiting. In retail, getting people in and out of the store quickly is the name of the game, and long lines are bad for business.

So, the store manager hoped that the dean could cobble together a team to search for a solution. The dean brushed him off, but Bob couldn’t help thinking as he listened in that this would be the perfect project for his buddy Joe. 

He was right. Joe has been hunting for something big to work on - and he instantly sees that if he can crack this problem, he could transform the retail business. Joe thanks Bob - and then gets thinking.

Soon, Joe becomes so excited about this project that he decides to leave Drexel to work on a solution to the inventory management and checkout problem full-time. He cashes in some stock he owns and relocates to Miami Beach where he moves into an apartment owned by his grandfather.

Then one day in January 1949, as he sits alone on the beach surrounded by families enjoying the sun, Joe has an epiphany. Using his finger, he begins to punch dots and dashes into the sand beside him. From his time as a Boy Scout, Joe knows all about Morse Code, which can transmit complicated messages electronically. But perhaps, he wonders, there is a way to use the same principle in retail. On a whim, he lengthens the marks in the sand into long vertical lines and bars, some thin, some fat. Then, he stands up from his beach chair and looks down at the lines. He takes a step switching his position, and looks again, and he smiles: the elongated marks are clear from nearly any angle. If somehow those Morse Code-like patterns could contain pricing information, be printed on products, and read by a machine, then there would be no need for a grocery clerk to enter prices by hand.

Inspired, Joe sends word back to Bob Silver. His old friend from grad school joins him in Florida, and the two set to work on Joe’s idea. The first thing they have to figure out is a way to make the printed code readable.

As a proof-of-concept, Joe and Bob use a 500-watt bulb to blast bright light off of the printed lines. This results in reflected patterns that can be read by a photomultiplier tube, a device capable of detecting light.

The test proves successful, but the machine Joe and Bob have created is far too big and too hot for commercial use. Thinking that a different pattern might be easier to read, the two men swap their straight lines for a bullseye design. That seems to work better. And satisfied with their new approach, later in 1949, they file for a patent. They then shop their idea to different electronics companies, hoping to find a partner to develop it further. But the response is not what they hope for. It seems like the idea, although ingenious, is not commercially viable.

Dejected, Joe and Bob decide to sell their patent and, in 1952, an electronics manufacturer in Philadelphia agrees to pay them $15,000 for the idea. The two young inventors split the windfall and then go their separate ways.

Their idea hasn’t changed the retail industry as they hoped, not yet. But Joe and Bob’s patent won’t be forgotten. Eventually, technology will advance far enough to make their ambitions a reality, and then finally, the barcode’s time will come.

Act Two

It’s 1969 at the offices of the technology firm IBM in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

45-year-old engineer George Laurer sits at his desk reviewing a stack of technical documents. He works methodically with a cold, neglected cup of coffee at his side and an ashtray brimming with cigarette stubs.

George has been with IBM since 1951 when he first joined the company as a junior engineer. Since then, he's been steadily working his way up the ranks and has recently been promoted to senior scientist. That’s meant moving into a new office here at one of the company’s major research centers.

By the late 1960s, International Business Machines, or IBM, is a household name in the United States. Among the firm’s early innovations was the public address system used in classrooms across the country. It also produced a punch card machine used by the government to build its network of Social Security numbers. And the company made the first calculator that could directly subtract.

In more recent years, IBM has invented many of the core technologies behind the computers used by businesses and governments around the world. And now, the company has its sights set on revolutionizing another new industry - mass-market retail.

The retail world has experienced tremendous growth. Convenience store sales have tripled in past three years. And over the course of the past decade, more than 8,000 shopping malls have been built across America.

There is clearly money to be made in retail, and IBM wants a piece of the action. So, they’ve assigned George, to find a solution to an old problem: tracking inventory in grocery stores and simplifying the still time-consuming checkout process.

So, as George scans through the weighty technical documents on his desk, he stumbles on an idea that's almost two decades old, a patent that has just expired: Joe Woodland and Bob Silver’s bullseye barcode. It’s an intriguing concept, but as George investigates further, he quickly realizes there’s a problem with Joe’s circular pattern. It’s too complicated to print the labels, where any error, any smudge, might make them useless. But George doesn’t give up on the idea. He can see that the concept could be effective and that the technology now exists to make it viable. Joe and Bob tried to read their original barcodes using bulky high-power lights and a photomultiplier tube. But now, there are lasers, optical scanners, and computers that could do the job much more efficiently.

So, George sets about tweaking Joe’s barcode to see if he can come up with an improved approach.

It’s a race against time though. The Kroger Company runs one of the largest supermarket chains in North America. It's made a public plea for technology that can provide faster and more productive service for customers and one of IBM’s biggest rivals, RCA, has answered that call. It’s been working on its own version of a circular barcode for years, coupling it with an optical scanner that can read the price of each item and a computer that can track the sale as part of an inventory management system.

RCA has a clear head start. But George doesn’t give up hope. He takes Joe Woodland’s idea and reimagines it, this time with a vertical rather than a circular pattern of stripes to prevent smearing during printing. He proposes the new design to his bosses at IBM, who like what they see and want him to form a team to continue working on it. Fortunately for George, IBM has the perfect partner for him in its ranks - Joe Woodland.

Joe has been quietly employed with IBM for almost two decades. Now, together with a mathematician, George and Joe develop and tweak their new vertical barcode concept until it’s perfect. But once again, it seems their rivals at RCA are one step ahead of them.

After years of research and development, by the summer of 1972, RCA’s barcode technology is ready. Its first test takes place at the Kroger Kenwood Plaza store in Cincinnati and it’s a success. The scanner reads the barcode perfectly. But George and Joe, and the rest of the team at IBM aren’t throwing in the towel just yet.

It’s one thing to convince Kroger but RCA’s version of the barcode will only become an industry standard if it's accepted by other retailers as well - if it becomes a universal product code. And other supermarket chains haven’t made their choice yet. So, IBM still has a chance.

The stage is set for a showdown between two technology juggernauts, and, in the battle for supermarket supremacy, only one team will emerge victorious.

Act Three

It’s March 30th, 1973, in a hotel close to Grand Central Station in New York City, four years after George Laurer started work on a new barcode system for IBM.

In a stuffy conference room, a group of business executives sit around a long table. They're all members of the Symbol Selection Committee, a group formed by the nation’s largest supermarket chains to identify a universal barcode technology to use for inventory management in all their stores. This committee has received an appraisal of the different options from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT and today, they will discuss the recommendations and take a vote.

So far, the front runner is RCA, which has a fully functioning bullseye design they’ve fine-tuned over years. But at the last minute, and seemingly out of nowhere, IBM has also submitted a bid.

With the help of Joe Woodland, the original inventor of the bullseye symbol, IBM scientist George Laurer has developed his own version of the barcode. It’s rectangular and uses vertical stripes which are cheaper and easier to print than the circular pattern on RCA’s labels. George’s version also includes a check digit at the bottom, to provide easy error detection and correction. He’s confident his design is far superior to RCA’s, and when the votes are counted, the committee agrees. It’s a unanimous decision - IBM’s barcode, with its clean, readable lines, is the clear winner. George’s design becomes the Universal Product Code or UPC.

The UPC is not an immediate success, however. The scanning and computer technology it requires is still expensive, and many stores in the 1970s choose to continue doing things the old-fashioned way. It’s only later, in the 1980s that the technology becomes cheaper and the UPC becomes ubiquitous.

Today, it's an almost unremarkable element of ordinary life. But without the innovative thinking of engineers like Joe Woodland, Bob Silver, and George Laurer, those little boxes of black and white stripes might not exist. And the world of retail might look a lot more like it did before the first UPC barcode was scanned on June 26th, 1974.

Outro

Next on History Daily. June 27th, 1954. The CIA deposes one of Guatemala's first democratically elected president, upending the nation's government and ushering in decades of instability. 

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Gabriel Gould.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Scott Weiss.

Edited by William Simpson.

Managing producer Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.