It's Bar
Code Day. So here are ten things you may not know about barcodes:
- The first barcodes were used to label railway cars.
- The first barcode for groceries was invented by Bernard Silver and Norman Joseph Woodland, who'd been asked by the food chain, Food Fair, to find out if there was a way to read product information at the checkout.
- The first item ever to be scanned was a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum, in Ohio, in 1974. The gum is now in the Smithsonian museum.
- In the UK, the first product to have a barcode was Melrose 100 Century teabags in 1978.
- In China, all barcodes start with a figure eight, because it is pronounced the same way as the word for "prosperity" and is considered to be a lucky number.
- Talking of numbers, conspiracy theorists have suggested that the Guard bars, the bit containing patterns at the beginning, middle, and end of a barcode, look like the coding for the number 6 and are therefore code for the number of the beast, 666. The developer of the UPC code, George J. Laurer made a statement to reassure people that there was nothing sinister about it, it was a coincidence, like the fact that all three of his names had six letters.
- By entering personal information at http://www.barcodeart.com/artwork/netart/yourself/index.html you can get your own personal barcode which you can download, print, and scan to find out how much you are worth!
- Five billion barcodes are scanned worldwide every day.
- The first barcode scanners were the size of a Washing machine because they contained components that had to be water-cooled.
- The world's smallest barcode has lines one thousandth of an inch wide. Why so small? Because they were attached to bees to monitor their mating habits.
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