Every time a barcode beeps at checkout, it's the end product of a problem retailers were trying to solve nearly eighty years ago: how do you get a product's identity into a computer without a cashier typing it in by hand?
The 1949 patent, drawn in sand
The earliest known barcode concept came from Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver, two graduate students who filed a patent in 1949 after Woodland reportedly sketched an early version of the idea in the sand on a beach, dragging his fingers to form concentric circles inspired by Morse code. Their original design was a circular "bullseye" pattern rather than the straight lines we're used to today, meant to be read from any angle.
The technology existed decades before the infrastructure did — there was no cheap, reliable laser scanner or standardized numbering system to make it practical at scale, so the idea largely sat dormant through the 1950s and 60s.
The industry standard that made it real
Grocery retailers and manufacturers spent much of the 1960s and early 70s trying to agree on a shared numbering standard — without one, a barcode scanner at one store couldn't reliably interpret a code printed by a different manufacturer. That effort led to the creation of the Uniform Product Code (UPC) standard in 1973, administered by what would eventually become GS1, the same organization that still governs GTIN numbering today.
The first scan
On June 26, 1974, a pack of Wrigley's chewing gum became the first retail product scanned using a UPC barcode at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio. That pack of gum is now preserved in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History — a small, unglamorous object that marks the moment barcodes went from patent filing to daily retail infrastructure.
From laser scanners to 2D codes
For the next two decades, barcodes remained almost exclusively linear (1D) — a single row of bars read by a sweeping laser beam. That changed in 1994, when Denso Wave, a subsidiary of Toyota, developed the QR code to track automotive parts through manufacturing. Its two-dimensional grid could hold far more data than a linear barcode in the same physical space, and unlike a laser scanner, it could be read by an ordinary camera — a detail that turned out to matter enormously once smartphones arrived.
Why QR codes took off outside manufacturing
QR codes existed for over a decade before they became a familiar sight on restaurant tables and marketing posters. The shift tracks almost exactly with smartphone camera adoption: once nearly everyone was carrying a device that could scan a 2D code without any dedicated hardware, QR codes became the obvious bridge between a printed object and a website, menu, or WiFi network — a use case linear barcodes, tied to dedicated scanner hardware, were never well suited for.
Where things stand now
Modern retail and logistics run on a mix of both generations of technology: linear formats like UPC-A, EAN-13 and CODE128 still handle the vast majority of point-of-sale and inventory scanning, precisely because the hardware is cheap, fast, and deeply entrenched in existing systems. QR codes and other 2D formats have carved out the consumer-facing and data-dense use cases that linear barcodes were never designed for. See our QR vs. barcode comparison for how to choose between them for a specific project today.