Few people think twice about the barcodes on their shopping, but in the 75 years since they were first dreamed up, they have helped save lives, gone into space and stoked fears of the Antichrist.
Lasers. That’s what supermarket staff need, insisted Paul McEnroe. Scanners in the checkout and little pistol-shaped laser guns, too. Point, shoot, sell!
In 1969, it was an outlandish vision of the future: these lasers would scan weird little black-and-white markings on products that McEnroe and his colleagues at IBM had designed. It would speed up supermarket queues, he enthused. The solution would come to be known as the barcode.
At this point in history barcodes had never been used commercially – though the idea had been brewing for decades following a patent filed on 20 October 1949 by one of the engineers who was now part of McEnroe’s team. The IBM engineers were trying to bring barcodes to life. They had a vision of the future where shoppers whizzed through the checkout with lasers scanning every item they wanted to purchase. But IBM’s lawyers had a problem with the future.
“No way,” they said, according to McEnroe, a now-retired engineer. Their fear was “laser suicide”. What if people intentionally injured their eyes with the scanners and then sued IBM? What if supermarket staff went blind?
No, no, this was a mere half-milliwatt laser beam, McEnroe tried to explain. There was 12,000 times more energy in a 60-watt lightbulb. His pleas fell flat. And so he turned to Rhesus monkeys imported from Africa, though now he can’t remember how many. “I think it was six,” he says. “I couldn’t swear to that.” After tests at a nearby laboratory proved that exposure to the tiny laser did not harm the animals’ eyes, the lawyers relented.
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