In mid 1971, William 'Bill' Crouse invented a new bar code called Delta C. In February, 1971, Baumeister joined Laurer. In late 1970, Heard Baumeister provided equations to calculate characters per inch achievable by two IBM bar codes, Delta A and Delta B. IBM proposal Īround late 1969, IBM at Research Triangle Park (RTP) in North Carolina assigned George Laurer to determine how to make a supermarket scanner and label. He chose the font, and he came up with the idea to add numbers to the bottom, which is a failsafe system, in case the code reader is down. As Chairman of a committee of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he helped select a symbol that would endure the inevitable rush of technology that lay ahead. Murray Eden was a consultant on the team that created the Universal Product Code barcode. A facsimile of the gum packet went on display at the Smithsonian Institution's American history museum in Washington, D.C. The shopping cart also contained other barcoded items but the gum was the first one picked up at the checkout. The first UPC-marked item ever to be scanned at a retail checkout was a 10-pack (50 sticks) of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum, purchased at the Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, at 8:01 a.m. Laurer, but with a slight modification to the font in the human readable area. The Symbol Selection Committee finally chose to implement the IBM proposal designed by George J. Technology firms including Charegon, IBM, Litton-Zellweger, Pitney Bowes-Alpex, Plessey-Anker, RCA, Scanner Inc., Singer, and Dymo Industries/Data General, put forward alternative proposals for symbol representations to the council. In 1973, a group of trade associations from the grocery industry formed the Uniform Product Code Council (UPCC) which, with the help of consultants Larry Russell and Tom Wilson of McKinsey & Company, defined the numerical format that formed the basis of the Uniform Product Code. In the 1960s and early 1970s, railroads in North America experimented with multicolor bar codes for tracking railcars, but this system was eventually abandoned and replaced with a radio-based system called Automatic Equipment Identification (AEI). Bernard Silver and Norman Joseph Woodland, a graduate student from Drexel Institute of Technology (now Drexel University), developed a bull's-eye-style code and applied for the patent in 1949. Wallace Flint proposed an automated checkout system in 1932 using punched cards. Please discuss this issue on the talk page and edit it to conform with Wikipedia's Manual of Style.

This article duplicates the scope of other articles, specifically Barcode#History.

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