I remember I was thinking about dots and dashes when I poked my four fingers into the sand and, for whatever reason-I didn’t know-I pulled my hand toward me and I had four lines. As he was sitting in a beach chair and pondering the checkout dilemma, Morse came into his head: Woodland had learned it when he was in the Boy Scouts.
#Checkout counter code
It was Morse Code that gave him the idea. Joe Woodland (here) and Bernard Silver filed a patent in 1949, which was granted in 1952. It was in January 1949 that Woodland had his epiphany, though the brilliance of its simplicity and its far-reaching consequences for modern existence were not recognized until many years later. He had cashed in some stocks to tide him over.
So confident was he that he would come up with a solution to the supermarket dilemma that Woodland left graduate school in the winter of 1948 to live in an apartment owned by his grandfather in Miami Beach. Woodland was already an inventor, and he decided to take on the challenge. He mentioned it to Woodland, who had graduated from Drexel in 1947. The dean shrugged him off, but a junior postgraduate, Bernard "Bob" Silver, overheard and was intrigued. The delays and the regular stocktaking were costing him his profits. That such a technology was needed was not his idea: it came from a distraught supermarket manager who had pleaded with a dean at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia to come up with some way of getting shoppers through his store more quickly. What he was after was a code of some sort that could be printed on groceries and scanned so that supermarket checkout queues would move more quickly and stocktaking would be simplified. Joe Woodland said himself it sounded like a fairy tale: he had gotten the inspiration for what became the bar code while sitting on Miami Beach. The first item marked with the Universal Product Code (UPC) was scanned at the checkout of Troy's Marsh Supermarket. Their ample reward was a place in American history. Dawson explained later that this was not a lucky dip: he chose it because nobody had been sure that a bar code could be printed on something as small as a pack of chewing gum, and Wrigley had found a solution to the problem. Legend has it that Dawson dipped into his shopping basket and pulled out a multi-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum. The first "shopper" was Clyde Dawson, who was head of research and development for Marsh Supermarket the pioneer cashier who "served" him, Sharon Buchanan. The night before, a team of Marsh staff had moved in to put bar codes on hundreds of items in the store while National Cash Register installed their scanners and computers. It was treated ceremonial occasion and involved a little bit of ritual. on June 26, 1974, that the first item marked with the Universal Product Code (UPC) was scanned at the checkout of Troy’s Marsh Supermarket. At the time, National Cash Register, which provided the checkout equipment, was based in Ohio and Troy was also the headquarters of the Hobart Corporation, which developed the weighing and pricing machines for loose items such as meat. Every few years, the small town of Troy in Miami County, Ohio celebrates an historic occasion that for a few giddy weeks puts it on the world map of the grocery trade.
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