The First Product Sold with a Barcode: A 67-Cent Pack of Gum

That short "beep" you hear for every item at the supermarket checkout has a birthday: June 26, 1974. The first item scanned that morning was neither an electronic gadget nor anything expensive. It was just a 10-pack of fruit-flavored gum.

Troy, Ohio: one morning, one pack of gum

The scene was the Marsh Supermarket in the small town of Troy in the US state of Ohio. The night before, store employees had stuck barcodes on hundreds of products. A little after 8 in the morning, cashier Sharon Buchanan passed a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit, placed at the register, over the scanner.

The person who bought the gum was no ordinary customer: it was Clyde Dawson, Marsh's head of research and development. According to GS1, the pack cost 67 cents. Dawson thus became the first person to buy a product whose price was read from a code on its packaging.

The scanner used that day was the Model A, developed by Spectra-Physics together with NCR, and according to the Smithsonian it is now in the collection of the National Museum of American History.

The idea was born in the sand

The story of the barcode goes back much further than 1974. According to Drexel University, in 1948 Bernard Silver, a graduate student at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, overheard the head of a grocery chain asking a dean for a system that could automatically read product information at checkout. Silver told his friend Norman Joseph Woodland about the problem.

In the winter of 1949 Woodland was staying with his grandfather in Miami. One day, sitting on the beach, he remembered the Morse code he knew from the Boy Scouts and drew dots and dashes in the sand. Then he stretched them downward with his fingers. As Woodland later told it, the dots and dashes turned into thin and thick lines. That was the basic idea of the barcode.

Some sources give 1948 as the year of this moment; Drexel's account points to the winter of 1949.

Patent in 1952, but the world wasn't ready

Woodland and Silver filed their patent application on October 20, 1949. The patent was granted on October 7, 1952 as number 2,612,994. Interestingly, the patent covered not only straight lines but also circular "bullseye" codes.

The problem was that in those years there was no practical device that could read the code quickly and cheaply at checkout. The pair sold their patent to Philco in 1952 for $15,000. Woodland had moved to IBM in 1951 and never let go of his idea.

The next step came in 1973. A committee formed by the grocery industry chose the vertical-bar design developed by George Laurer of IBM. According to Wikipedia, this design could be printed better than Woodland and Silver's circular code. Wikipedia also says Woodland played an important role in developing the UPC on the IBM team in North Carolina, and that IBM's proposal won out over rival RCA's. That is how the code we now know as the UPC was born, and a year later it was printed on that pack of gum in Troy.

A small beep, a big change

Notice the time in between: from the drawing in the sand to the first pack of gum scanned, about a quarter of a century passed. The idea was ready early, but it took time for the readers, the computers and the industry's agreement on a common standard to make it work at the checkout. Sometimes getting an invention into real life takes far longer than the invention itself.

The barcode radically changed price entry and inventory counting at the checkout. For this contribution Woodland received the US National Medal of Technology in 1992 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2011. Woodland died on December 9, 2012 at the age of 91, so he saw with his own eyes the idea he drew in the sand sweep the world.

Cashiers no longer had to key in the price of every item by hand, and stores could instantly see how many of each product they had sold. The readable codes we see everywhere today, from shipping parcels to airline tickets, are all relatives of the same idea.

A few lines drawn in the sand on a beach, beeping at checkouts all over the world decades later, shows how closely chance and perseverance can be intertwined.

What would you have picked as the first product to be scanned?