Google has honoured the 57th anniversary of the invention of the bar code
Users of the internet search engine are being greeted with a bar code in place of the usual Google logo, exactly 57 years after United States inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver were granted a patent.
It follows recent Google doodles in honour of the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius and Mahatma Gandhi, the father of modern India.
Woodland and Silver, who met while students at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, originally devised a system that would encode data in concentric circles.
The lines of varying width were developed later, partly inspired by Morse code.
According to a Washington Post report, the doodle bar code appears to have been created by encrypting the word ‘Google’ using Code 128, a standard symbology.
The original patent was filed by Woodland and Silver in 1949 and granted on 7 October 1952.
However, bar codes were not used commercially until retailers in the National Association of Food Chains (NAFC) agreed on the familiar Universal Product Code designs that are still seen on billions of worldwide items today.
The first supermarket scanner that could read UPC bar codes was installed at March’s supermarket in Troy, Ohio, in June 1974. The first product to bear the bar code was a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum.
