(on products… almost everywhere)

We each encounter them almost continually—so much so that I would suggest we have become numbed by them. These ugly, intrusive little zebra-contrast patches have been a part of buying and selling since the first bar-coded item, a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum, was scanned in 1974… we’ve been hearing the ubiquitous bleep bleep ever since.

Bar codes were originally invented in 1952 by Bernard Silver and Norman Woodland in Philadelphia, USA, but it wasn’t until 1973 that Woodland created an entire bar-code system, the Universal Product Code (UPC), to help stores track inventory and make check-outs faster. The UPC barcode was the first bar code symbology widely adopted by the grocery industry, followed by the EAN code format (similar to UPC, used internationally) in 1976.

The black bars represent a sequence of numbers. The five digits on the left represent the product’s manufacturer, with the five digits on the right representing the specific product. Bar codes are configured the way they are to permit a laser scanner to read the varying widths of lines to determine the digits listed underneath. The information is transmitted to a store computer which matches the numbers to a product price—in the bleep of a second.

Images above: at top, the UPC-A, the universal product code seen on almost all retail products in the USA and Canada; below, a selection of creative bar code iterations from Japan… go figure.