barcode, QR code, Morse code, barcoding

In today’s world of emerging technologies, Morse code can seem like a long-forgotten form of communication. But did you know that the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles, California uses Morse code to send out an ongoing message? According to Wikipedia, “The blinking light atop the tower spells out the word “Hollywood” in Morse code.” And did you know that April 27th is recognized every year as Morse Code Day? I’ll admit, I didn’t, but the topic is near and dear to me.  

My father served in the British Royal Air Force and was involved in radio work and RADAR (coined in the 1940s for Radio Detection And Ranging). He was also a keen ham radio operator. In fact, I remember him whistling his ham radio call sign in Morse code at the dinner table! We had it engraved on his gravestone when he sadly passed away in 2020. So anything about Morse code has already grabbed my attention. 

Let’s talk a little more about this telecommunication method that dates all the way back to the mid-1800s.

Morse Code and the Revolution of Long-Distance Communication

Morse code is behind one of the biggest revolutions in production and every form of manufacturing. Developed in the 1840s for use with Samuel F.B. Morse’s electric telegraph, Morse code simplified communications, allowing users to send messages around the world via electric pulses through wired telegraph lines and later through radio waves. Morse code gave rise to barcodes and UPC codes which later gave rise to QR codes, giving us the ability to track the entire lifespan of a product or component from raw materials to the end-of-life recycling process.

Now we use barcodes to send and track materials, products and parcels around the world. And the two are directly related.

The Morse Code Foundation for Early Barcodes

Perhaps you’ve heard the story of Norman Joseph Woodland. In 1948, a Philadelphia supermarket manager contacted the dean at Drexel Institute of Technology looking for a way to move shoppers through the store and check-out lanes faster and make stock-taking more efficient. Graduate student Woodland took on the challenge. While sitting on a beach in Florida, he used Morse code (which he learned during his Boy Scout days) to create the barcode when he “extended the dots and dashes downward and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them” to solve the grocery store puzzle.

“My idea originally came from…the ‘dash-dot-dash’ pattern of Morse code,” Woodland said in 1991, according to IBM. “That’s essentially what barcoding is…a non-verbal symbol…a Morse code for reading a label.”

Because of its need for a specific orientation, Morse code was limited. So, Woodland drew his lines into a target-shaped circle.

In October 1949, Woodland and fellow Drexel alum Bernard Silver built a working prototype describing their invention as “article classification…through the medium of identifying patterns.” Three years later, they received U.S. Patent # 2,612,994 for their “Classifying Apparatus and Method.” It consisted of thick and thin concentric circles, like a target or bullseye, that could be scanned from any orientation.

It took a while for technology to catch up to Woodland’s prototype – optical scanners were large and expensive. Philco, RCA and IBM all played a part in getting the technology worked out with lasers and microchips, to invent a device capable of reading code. With the revolutionary inventions of microchips in 1958 and lasers in 1960, early barcode reader capabilities became possible.

Evolution of Bullseye Barcodes to UPC Codes

In the early 1970s, George Lauer at IBM changed the bullseye barcode into a rectangular shape with thick and thin parallel lines, which he dubbed the universal product code or UPC. IBM set up a test demo with a coded label on a baseball which they threw over a laser to read the code – it worked.

In June 1974, at Marsh’s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a 10-pack of gum became the first product ever scanned for sale. Ten years later, barcodes became ubiquitous in grocery and drug stores and by 1991, clothing stores, hardware stores, and even sporting arenas started adopting barcodes.

Inventory Management Systems, Real-time Data and ERP

The 1990s saw the beginning of real-time inventory management systems capturing point of sale and demand data, managed by a backend ERP system. I remember working with a QAD customer automating its warehouse services. I wrote the software to produce the barcode labels with the goal of reducing labor costs via automation. The  goal was to identify how to get the product to the correct store location of the big retailer, as automatically as possible. We combined the labels with Advanced Shipping Notices (ASNs) sent to a shipper that used this information to sort packages for national distribution. It was fascinating to see how quickly the products moved through the scanning process. A barcode could be scanned from any orientation by a scanner and in the blink of an eye. Ironically, I learned that scanners at the time seemed to have a problem with blue packaging – the manufacturer needed to change some of their package colors to remedy this!

Barcode Data Limitations Lead to Development of QR Codes

Barcodes in their earliest iterations were limited to 12 digits. The need for more data on labels led to the origins of 2-D Quick Read or QR codes, that can hold 7,000 digits or 4,000 letters/characters. In 1994, Denso Wave engineer Masahiro Hara, inspired by the game of Go with its black and white squares and spaces, worked to orient the patterns into data to expand how much data a code could hold.

With QR codes, manufacturers are no longer limited in the amount of information they can add to a code. Instead of being limited to a UPC code that could only identify a product model, you could now identify each serialized product. Thus, every single iteration of a product can have a unique QR code. For example, every unique medical device QR code has an identifier that contains its individual history. Traceability improves, efficiency improves. Product QR codes can also include a website URL link, offering even greater amounts of information.

Emerging Technologies and ESG Performance and Tracking

To meet customer demands for knowledge, manufacturers are adding more product information into codes – for example, Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) factors – that measure a company and its products’ sustainability. The coding shows where a product came from, whether it was ethically sourced and made, the environmental effects of the production, what its origins are, and so on. Embedding codes into materials and components helps with recycling at the end-of-life phase. In this way, we can track the entire lifecycle of materials – a product, a component – from raw material to manufacturing to the consumer to the product’s recycling, while tracking its identity.

Automating and Digitizing Material and Production Data

Managing material handling and warehousing operations while also meeting customer expectations can prove to be difficult. Manufacturers need real-time visibility into material flows and digital automation techniques to be successful. Automating data collection, warehousing and shop floor instructions can actually lead to inventory reductions and more effective material flow.

These challenges prompted us to develop a key solution of the QAD Adaptive Applications portfolio. QAD Automation Solutions gives manufacturers the tools, including barcodes, to automate and digitize the capture of material and production data and print labels according to manufacturer, supplier or customer formats. This unified form of labeled communication improves material handling effectiveness while meeting global barcode standards and serialization requirements. Some of the benefits of an automated data management system include reduced labor, less downtime and greater inventory accuracy. QAD Automation Solutions promotes a real-time view of where items are located that wasn’t possible in the manual world.

If only Samuel Morse had known how his simple Morse code would lead to the full traceability potential of material as it flows through the manufacturing process from raw material to recycling and the innovative technologies that would follow.

1 COMMENT

  1. Hi there Tony: I have been doing this Barcode thing since 1982. worked for Weber, CCL and Avery label companies as a technician and sales person.
    RE: QR codes, Wish that this article was about [The Evolution of Barcode Systems: From Morse Code to 2DCodes.] QR codes are not the answer to all the needs of Barcoding… DataMatrix and Aztec codes are also great means of encoding data. Hospital and medical fields are using them and they support higher density for their size”, “Data matrix codes have a higher density, so they can occupy less space than a barcode. This makes them much more suitable to use on small products and round surfaces. Another advantage of data matrix codes is that even if up to 30% of the surface is destroyed, they can still be read and decoded.”Data Matrix codes have become the standard for anti-counterfeit measures, part identification, and internal tracking because they feature advanced error-correcting techniques that are more robust than QR codes” ” The Aztec code uses its space more efficiently than other matrix codes. The size can also vary, allowing it potentially to hold vast amounts of information.”
    In my opinion, and now perhaps yours; the QR code is not as good as these other codes. Please consider this in your printing functions of the QAD software. I have been selling Barcode systems since 1987.

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