Yesterday, on Oct 7, 2009, users were greeted with a bar code that replaced the usual Google doodle. It was Google’s way of commemorating anniversary of the barcode which came into being on the same day of 1952. But what did the barcode say? A Washington Post report said that the doodle bar code appeared to have been created by encrypting the word ‘Google’ using Code 128, a standard symbology. While all guesses unanimously landed on ‘Google’, we still checked it to kill our curiosity on onlinebarcodereader.com. The result was no different than 'Google'.
This is not the first time that Google encrypted its name in a doodle. Samuel Morse's birthday and Louis Braille's birthday were some other occasions when Google cleverly hid its logo. Google keeps changing its logo according to events and occasions. Their 10th birthday logo, Gandhi’s birthday logo, logo commemorating the anniversary of ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius, holiday logos, and fan created logos are few examples that show Goggle’s unique way of celebrating important events and occasions.
Getting back to Google’s barcode logo, it would be interesting to briefly look back at the history of barcode itself. “Inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver filed the patent on October 1949, and it was granted, No. 2,612,994 (pdf), on October 7, 1952. The original patent was for a system that would encode data in circles (a bulls eye pattern), so that it could be scanned in any direction,” informs techcrunch.com. "This invention relates to the art of article classification and has particular relation to classification through the medium of identifying patterns. It is an object of the invention to provide automatic apparatus for classifying things according to photo-response to lines and/or colors which constitute classification instructions and which have been attached to, imprinted upon or caused to represent the things being classified," explains the patent.
The Barcode Inventors
A Telegraph report on Google’s barcode informs about the inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver who met each other while students at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia. They joined hands and originally devised a system that would encode data in concentric circles. It was later that the lines of varying width were developed inspired by Morse code.
Commercial Use
To be used commercially, the barcode was dependent on a unanimous agreement of the retailers in the National Association of Food Chains (NAFC) over Universal Product Code designs. This took some time to happen and resulted in commercial adaptation of the Universal Product Code designs that we still see on items today. The Telegraph informs that the first supermarket scanner that could read UPC bar codes was installed at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, in June 1974 and that the first product to bear the bar code was a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum.
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