Lines in the sand inspired the modern world's code

Melbourne Herald Sun, Friday 21, 2012 

Your shopping whips down the conveyor belt and into the bag making a little blip! on the way and you don't even think about the massive amount of calculation and technology going on in the background.

The product is individually identified from billions of others around the world by its own unique code, a number that is read in an instant from a jumble of lines in a little square. Scores of different technologies are needed to make this happen, most of them developed and grown in the years since World War II.

Computers, laser scanners, computer printers, fork-lifts and warehousing technology - today's commercial operations are totally different from even a few decades ago, and the quantity of goods and money moved each day would have been unthinkable.

But at the heart is one little graphic invention: the bar code. An idea born in 1948, in its own way it was as important as the invention of Arabic numbers in making the manipulation of figures possible.

Last weekend saw the death of the man who came up with the idea of depicting large complex numbers as a series of thick and thin lines: Joseph Woodland.

Aren't you fascinated by the tiny little thought that can trigger a great idea? Newton's falling apple evoking gravity; Fleming's mouldy dish evoking penicillin; Archimedes understanding water displacement when his bath overflowed, and running naked through Syracuse shouting "eureka!".

In the case of Woodland, he was struggling with how to encode product information in an easily-readable form. He retreated to his grandparents' Miami Beach house and spent months sitting in the sand thinking. One day, making finger ridges in the sand, his schoolboy knowledge of Morse code came to mind. Could a series of thick and thin lines, like the dots and dashes of Morse, be used to depict complex numbers?

By 1949 he and fellow graduate student Bernard Silver had developed the beginnings of what is now officially the International Article Number, expressed by the symbol we call a barcode.

His lines formed a circle, like a target, but the support technology was too expensive and cumbersome so they ended up selling the patent for $15,000 - all they ever made from the invention.

By the 1970s lasers, scanners and computers had arrived and IBM was able to create the scanning system that we know today, using a development team including Joseph Woodland. He and Silver were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame last year.

I learned about barcodes seventeen years ago when I got the task of creating an education display for the numbering authority, EAN - today called GS1. With their marketing manager, Graham McAlpine, we devised a baked bean factory - for simplicity.

Into the factory come beans, labels, cans - all identified by codes. They are cooked, canned, packed, palleted. Every step of the process carries its own code number. The beans are shipped to a "supermarket" and stacked on shelves. As they are sold, every can is accounted for all the way along the supply chain.

The exercise displayed that bar coding is not just an easy way to put prices on packs. It gives the manufacturer and retailer total knowledge and control of the process. What is being made? When will it arrive? What has been sold? Stock position? All the figures are available on the computer screen, instantly.

The baked bean factory is long gone, but its modern incarnation is still active, in Mt Waverley. There are educational tours for businesses, universities and schools contact them through www.GS1au.org. 

ray@ebeatty.com