The History of Barcodes: From a 1948 Idea to a Global Standard
QR & Barcode Standards Specialist · Last updated Jul 2, 2026
Barcodes are so woven into daily life that most of us never give them a second glance — yet every beep at a checkout traces back to a question overheard in a grocery store and a pattern drawn in the sand.
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Create Your Free Code NowA question in a grocery store
In 1948, a local food-chain executive asked the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia to research a way to capture product information automatically at checkout. A graduate student named Bernard Silver overheard the request and teamed up with his colleague Norman Joseph Woodland to solve it.
Drawing in the sand
The breakthrough came in 1949. Sitting on Miami Beach and thinking about Morse code he had learned as a Boy Scout, Woodland drew dots and dashes in the sand, then pulled his fingers down to stretch them into thin and thick lines. That idea — a "bull's-eye" of concentric circles that could be read from any direction — became the first barcode patent, filed in 1949 and granted in 1952.
Ahead of its time
The invention arrived decades before the technology to use it. There were no affordable lasers or computers capable of reading and processing the code at speed, so the patent was eventually sold and the idea sat mostly unused through the 1950s and 1960s.
The laser, IBM, and the UPC
Everything changed with the arrival of the laser and cheaper computing. In the early 1970s, a team at IBM — where Woodland now worked — developed a practical rectangular symbol. Engineer George Laurer is credited with designing the Universal Product Code (UPC), and in 1973 an industry committee selected it as the standard for American retail.
The first scan
On the morning of June 26, 1974, at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum became the first retail product ever scanned with a UPC barcode. That pack of gum now sits in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
Going global
Europe soon adapted the concept into the European Article Number (EAN) in 1977, extending the system worldwide. The organisations behind UPC and EAN later unified under GS1, and today the underlying product number is known as the Global Trade Item Number (GTIN). To see how these numbering systems differ, compare EAN-13 and UPC-A.
The second dimension
As industries needed to store more than a product number, one-dimensional bars gave way to two-dimensional codes. Formats like Data Matrix and PDF417 packed far more data into a small space, and in 1994 Masahiro Hara at Japan's Denso Wave invented the QR Code to track automotive parts — a format that would later explode in popularity with smartphones.
Barcodes today
From a pattern in the sand to trillions of scans a day, barcodes now power retail, healthcare, logistics and payments across the planet. Explore the full family of formats in our barcode types guide, or see where the technology is heading in Barcodes & AI.