Norman Joseph Woodland, sketching on a Miami Beach shore, drags his fingers through the sand and forms concentric circles, imagining a code that could be read from any direction.
Woodland and Silver file a patent for their 'Classifying Apparatus and Method,' describing a linear and a circular bullseye-style barcode symbol.
Woodland and Silver build a bulky working prototype of their bullseye scanner, powered by an oversized light source and using RCA components, proving the concept but revealing its impracticality for retail use.
Facing rising labor costs and slow checkout lines, U.S. grocery trade associations form a committee to investigate automated product identification systems.
RCA, having acquired rights related to the original Woodland-Silver patent, conducts a real-world trial of a bullseye-style barcode scanning system in a Kroger supermarket.
An IBM team led by George Laurer, building on Woodland's own reengineering work, develops the rectangular linear barcode symbol that becomes the Universal Product Code, chosen over the original bullseye design.
A pack of Wrigley's chewing gum becomes the first retail product scanned using the Universal Product Code, at a Marsh supermarket in Ohio.
Through the late 1970s and 1980s, barcode scanning spreads globally beyond groceries into general retail, warehousing, shipping and manufacturing, revolutionizing inventory management.
Engineer Masahiro Hara at Denso Wave in Japan invents the Quick Response (QR) code, a two-dimensional matrix barcode capable of storing far more data than linear barcodes.
Radio-frequency identification tags, building on decades of parallel development, become widely commercialized for retail and logistics, allowing wireless, contactless tracking of goods without direct line of sight.
The prototype used a 500-watt bulb so powerful it risked scorching the paper labels it was meant to read, along with a fragile arrangement of photomultiplier tubes and oscilloscope-derived circuitry. Silver died in a car accident in 1963, before the technology matured, never seeing the commercial success their invention would eventually achieve. Woodland went to work for IBM, carrying the idea with him even as it remained commercially unworkable for want of cheap, compact lasers and integrated circuits.