Chewing Gum Made Barcode History In 1974

On June 26, 1974, Clyde Dawson approached the checkout counter at Marsh's Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. He lifted from his cart a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum and handed it to checker Sharon Buchanan, who slid it across something she'd been told was a barcode scanner. The cash register rang up 67 cents, and at 8:01 that summer morning, a pack of chewing gum became the first UPC-barcoded product ever scanned electronically.

UPC barcodes are commonplace today. Nearly all modern businesses use them for tracking such things as payroll and inventory. Laser scanners, wireless scanners and cordless scanners are part of our modern existence.

Such widespread automation was first envisioned in 1932, when business student Wallace Flint promoted his concept of a store in which shoppers would select products by pulling punch cards from a catalog and handing them to a checker. Fed to a reader, these cards would transmit the order electronically to a warehouse, where workers would place the items on a conveyor belt for delivery to the checkout.

Although that idea proved unworkable, dreams of a streamlined checkout system refused to die. In 1948, the president of the Food Fair supermarket chain broached the subject to the Drexel Institute of Technology. Graduate students Bernard Silver and Norman Joseph Woodland were up to the challenge.

Their first design, based on ultraviolet-sensitive ink, failed to stand up to the light source, and the model proved excessively expensive. Nevertheless, by 1949, Silver and Woodland had produced the working prototype of a scanner designed to read circular bull's-eye codes. They patented their model on October 7, 1952.

It was patented, yes, but was it workable? Many thought not, and the idea failed to gain traction. Woodland and Silver cut their losses, selling their patent to Philco in 1962. One year later, Silver died in a car accident. He was 38 years old.

In 1968, an early scanning system based on Silver-Woodland's original bull's-eye design appeared in a Kroger store in Cincinnati, Ohio. Under this implementation, these codes were not intrinsic to the product packaging.

Instead, they were printed on stickers, each of which required manual application to its corresponding product by a store employee. While this procedure did keep workers busy, it was cumbersome and error-prone. Worse, no barcode standard existed at the time, and industry pundits agreed that one was necessary.

In 1969, the National Association of Food Chains formed an ad hoc committee with one aim in mind, and that was to get those barcodes standardized. On April 3, 1974, the committee formally accepted developer George J. Laurer's final prototype, naming it the Universal Product Code, or UPC. The barcode industry never looked back, and continues to evolve today.

Chewing gum is meant to be chewed, but that first UPC-coded pack of Wrigley's was destined for better things. It now resides at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History. Its contents remain untouched.

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