my topic today is the barcode revolution
and along the way you’ll see where it
came from I don’t want a little quiz to
begin with and and the quiz is whether
any of you who have seen this kind of
label maybe you’ve come maybe you’ve
come a home from a couple hands went up
a couple more hands
this would be a an Amazon type label I
say type because they use it and so two
other direct to the consumer from from
an internet purchase provided seven
billion of these labels are scanned
every day it’s a lot of barcodes that
includes order fulfillment shipping to
the carrier tracking along the way
delivery to your doorstep seven billion
a day
so barcode has a big audience if you go
to a store and some people still do and
for some reason and and you go to a
counter it’s a may see your target and
you go to purchase something you’ll see
a variety of labels that look generally
speaking like this five billion of these
are scanned a day to get closer to the
home to paraphrase what we hear on
television what’s in your wallet what’s
in your wallet for most of us is a
driver’s license and this would be on
the back of your driver’s license and
210 million drivers in the u.s. today
have this label on their drivers license
so barcodes is everywhere now let’s go
back to the year I got out of MIT and I
was looking for my first professional
job computers were very widely admired
because they could crunch numbers like
nothing that ever been done before but
you couldn’t talk to them
there was no way to communicate what was
going on around you to an IBM mainframe
or a similar computer punchcards was the
best you could do and punch cards if any
of you who have ever used them are
pretty awkward to work with in 1959 when
I got out of school there was a
revolution I call it phase one and on my
desk in a research lab in Waltham on 128
in a big company so they landed a
project and I was asked to find a way to
record the passing of rail cars in their
normal operation that would be a
requirement to read rail cars that they
were properly identifiable as many as
three four or five times a day the two
possibilities because the cost of the
label was was an overpowering
consideration it had to be low blow
though the two considerations were to
read the the initials of the of the
railroad Illinois Central had initials
by the arrow on the screen I see and
read the serial number next to that set
of initials which is typically a six
digit set of numbers alternatively in
the lab because we a lot of smart people
that I could kind of pick a team we
looked at a way to take an optical
reflection of a scanner beam and sense
it in terms of its duration and and
white dark contrast light our contrast
if you want to try and imagine that
think of a of a sailor on a ship at sea
in world war ii and they couldn’t
communicate by radio because the enemy
could hear them so they’re looking at at
semaphore Morse code back and forth
between one ship and another that’s the
the underlying principle of barcode
scanning the first scanner to be
installed was in 1961 it was not very
far from the lab in Waltham it was in
Woburn message
it’s on the Boston and Maine railroad
and and this scanner was installed first
as a development tool and secondly to
send the data to the B and M railroad
because they were tracking the delivery
of gravel cars to New Hampshire as they
built route 93 it worked very very well
it worked so well that we shortly after
that decided to make it a commercial
product and take it to the marketplace
in the next two or three years we sold
twenty systems all over the world doing
this kind of thing however that was
about two hundred thousand dollars worth
of business and the the market that we
wanted to reach and we had done market
research was a 58 million dollar market
but you couldn’t reach the market
because the big market because all the
the freight cars in North America had to
be labeled and they were owned by over a
thousand car owners many of them big big
railroads but a lot of other were car
owners as well trying to say how do we
get there from a standstill so to speak
we developed a concept called Sylvania
Rail Data Corporation and Sylvania real
data corporation was an offer to the
railroads such that if they put in a
small amount of investment like $2 per
car on the average we would label every
freight car in North Market and we would
lease them scanners I think it was
$1,000 a month
for whatever location they wanted but we
wanted the right to also put in scanners
of our own collect the information and
use it in any way that made commercial
sense to us it was a great offer and
solved their technical problem but they
said we don’t want to lose control of
the information we don’t want to do that
we said well you got the solution to
your technical problem so they said okay
we will label all the cars in North
America and they did and the market
standardized at that point in 1967 with
this barcode technology universally
applied across North America now that
was a good time for me to leave a
company I thought because there were a
couple people who said they put an
investment in a new company that only
did barcode and I was all ears and there
were so many other problems to solve so
many other tracking and and data
collection challenges that people have
been coming to us and asking us to solve
but you couldn’t kind of get there with
the railroad scanning technology which
was a big white light box and a set of
appropriate sensors to collect the data
what we needed was a breakthrough in
scanning so that we could use the label
design as you see here to tailor
solutions to very different kinds of
problems problems like tracking
automotive parts in an automotive
assembly plant problems like tracking
distribution of goods to the final
destination like we saw in that original
side so we started from scratch and
developed a laser scanner lasers now in
1971 were commercially available they
were big by today’s standards but they
were commercially available so we
re-engineered the whole scanning
technology and came out with the laser
scanner you see it this is one of the
first applications it’s scanning and
sorting packages to Marshalls you know
who still use of course this technology
10 volt compared to them anyway jumping
50 years ahead we now have a zero cost
label in the case of the railroads it
was a five dollar label in the case of
Amazon it’s a five cent label in the
case of this applica
it costs nothing it’s in your cellphone
you take a trip from JFK to LAX Los
Angeles up tops the authenticating
barcode the authenticating barcode lets
you go through security
it lets you board and it validates your
collection of your luggage if they have
that security step when you get where
you’re going we had a nice ceremony to
jump to it toward the end we had a nice
ceremony in a company in Rhode Island
which I I’m a little bit connected to in
2011 50 years later from the first
application of the barcode and attending
or helping us celebrate were two US
senators two United States congressional
representatives and the governor and and
at the end of that ceremony I was
presented a certificate of appreciation
as the father of the barcode industry
but there was there was even a better
moment after that about two years later
I was invited by the local my
granddaughter’s local fifth-grade class
to make a presentation about barcode and
I said I’d do that a heartbeat
that the audience was very very
cooperative antenna me
very very into it and it went on for the
typical 50 minute period or 45 minute
period at the end of that I came home
feeling very satisfied and a couple days
later I got an envelope in the mail and
it was thank-you letters from those who
attended and and this with this final
message and that to me is the highest
honor I’ve gotten in this technology
thanks for
[Applause]
and along the way you’ll see where it
came from I don’t want a little quiz to
begin with and and the quiz is whether
any of you who have seen this kind of
label maybe you’ve come maybe you’ve
come a home from a couple hands went up
a couple more hands
this would be a an Amazon type label I
say type because they use it and so two
other direct to the consumer from from
an internet purchase provided seven
billion of these labels are scanned
every day it’s a lot of barcodes that
includes order fulfillment shipping to
the carrier tracking along the way
delivery to your doorstep seven billion
a day
so barcode has a big audience if you go
to a store and some people still do and
for some reason and and you go to a
counter it’s a may see your target and
you go to purchase something you’ll see
a variety of labels that look generally
speaking like this five billion of these
are scanned a day to get closer to the
home to paraphrase what we hear on
television what’s in your wallet what’s
in your wallet for most of us is a
driver’s license and this would be on
the back of your driver’s license and
210 million drivers in the u.s. today
have this label on their drivers license
so barcodes is everywhere now let’s go
back to the year I got out of MIT and I
was looking for my first professional
job computers were very widely admired
because they could crunch numbers like
nothing that ever been done before but
you couldn’t talk to them
there was no way to communicate what was
going on around you to an IBM mainframe
or a similar computer punchcards was the
best you could do and punch cards if any
of you who have ever used them are
pretty awkward to work with in 1959 when
I got out of school there was a
revolution I call it phase one and on my
desk in a research lab in Waltham on 128
in a big company so they landed a
project and I was asked to find a way to
record the passing of rail cars in their
normal operation that would be a
requirement to read rail cars that they
were properly identifiable as many as
three four or five times a day the two
possibilities because the cost of the
label was was an overpowering
consideration it had to be low blow
though the two considerations were to
read the the initials of the of the
railroad Illinois Central had initials
by the arrow on the screen I see and
read the serial number next to that set
of initials which is typically a six
digit set of numbers alternatively in
the lab because we a lot of smart people
that I could kind of pick a team we
looked at a way to take an optical
reflection of a scanner beam and sense
it in terms of its duration and and
white dark contrast light our contrast
if you want to try and imagine that
think of a of a sailor on a ship at sea
in world war ii and they couldn’t
communicate by radio because the enemy
could hear them so they’re looking at at
semaphore Morse code back and forth
between one ship and another that’s the
the underlying principle of barcode
scanning the first scanner to be
installed was in 1961 it was not very
far from the lab in Waltham it was in
Woburn message
it’s on the Boston and Maine railroad
and and this scanner was installed first
as a development tool and secondly to
send the data to the B and M railroad
because they were tracking the delivery
of gravel cars to New Hampshire as they
built route 93 it worked very very well
it worked so well that we shortly after
that decided to make it a commercial
product and take it to the marketplace
in the next two or three years we sold
twenty systems all over the world doing
this kind of thing however that was
about two hundred thousand dollars worth
of business and the the market that we
wanted to reach and we had done market
research was a 58 million dollar market
but you couldn’t reach the market
because the big market because all the
the freight cars in North America had to
be labeled and they were owned by over a
thousand car owners many of them big big
railroads but a lot of other were car
owners as well trying to say how do we
get there from a standstill so to speak
we developed a concept called Sylvania
Rail Data Corporation and Sylvania real
data corporation was an offer to the
railroads such that if they put in a
small amount of investment like $2 per
car on the average we would label every
freight car in North Market and we would
lease them scanners I think it was
$1,000 a month
for whatever location they wanted but we
wanted the right to also put in scanners
of our own collect the information and
use it in any way that made commercial
sense to us it was a great offer and
solved their technical problem but they
said we don’t want to lose control of
the information we don’t want to do that
we said well you got the solution to
your technical problem so they said okay
we will label all the cars in North
America and they did and the market
standardized at that point in 1967 with
this barcode technology universally
applied across North America now that
was a good time for me to leave a
company I thought because there were a
couple people who said they put an
investment in a new company that only
did barcode and I was all ears and there
were so many other problems to solve so
many other tracking and and data
collection challenges that people have
been coming to us and asking us to solve
but you couldn’t kind of get there with
the railroad scanning technology which
was a big white light box and a set of
appropriate sensors to collect the data
what we needed was a breakthrough in
scanning so that we could use the label
design as you see here to tailor
solutions to very different kinds of
problems problems like tracking
automotive parts in an automotive
assembly plant problems like tracking
distribution of goods to the final
destination like we saw in that original
side so we started from scratch and
developed a laser scanner lasers now in
1971 were commercially available they
were big by today’s standards but they
were commercially available so we
re-engineered the whole scanning
technology and came out with the laser
scanner you see it this is one of the
first applications it’s scanning and
sorting packages to Marshalls you know
who still use of course this technology
10 volt compared to them anyway jumping
50 years ahead we now have a zero cost
label in the case of the railroads it
was a five dollar label in the case of
Amazon it’s a five cent label in the
case of this applica
it costs nothing it’s in your cellphone
you take a trip from JFK to LAX Los
Angeles up tops the authenticating
barcode the authenticating barcode lets
you go through security
it lets you board and it validates your
collection of your luggage if they have
that security step when you get where
you’re going we had a nice ceremony to
jump to it toward the end we had a nice
ceremony in a company in Rhode Island
which I I’m a little bit connected to in
2011 50 years later from the first
application of the barcode and attending
or helping us celebrate were two US
senators two United States congressional
representatives and the governor and and
at the end of that ceremony I was
presented a certificate of appreciation
as the father of the barcode industry
but there was there was even a better
moment after that about two years later
I was invited by the local my
granddaughter’s local fifth-grade class
to make a presentation about barcode and
I said I’d do that a heartbeat
that the audience was very very
cooperative antenna me
very very into it and it went on for the
typical 50 minute period or 45 minute
period at the end of that I came home
feeling very satisfied and a couple days
later I got an envelope in the mail and
it was thank-you letters from those who
attended and and this with this final
message and that to me is the highest
honor I’ve gotten in this technology
thanks for
[Applause]
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