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- THE first barcode ever scanned was on a pack of Wrigley's
Juicy Fruit chewing gum at Marsh's supermarket in Troy,
Ohio, this week in June 1974. The gum is now in the Smithsonian
museum.
- IN 1949, Norman Joseph Woodland got the idea for barcodes
when he made a handprint in sand and realised that bars
could be a visual equivalent of Morse code.
- AT first, the barcode proved so unpopular that in 1976
US magazine Business Week ran the headline, "The supermarket
scanner that failed". It had been predicted that 1,000
stores would be using scanners at that point, but only 50
had installed the costly equipment.
- ALL Chinese barcodes start with an eight, because it
is pronounced the same way as the word for "prosperity"
and is considered to be a lucky number.
- THE first barcode scanners were the size of a washing
machine because they contained components that had to be
water-cooled.
- THE world's smallest barcode was developed by Dr Stephen
Buchmann at the Carl Hayden Bee Research Centerin Arizona.
Tiny tags were attached to bees to monitor their mating
habits - each line of the code was one thousandth of an
inch wide.
- FIVE billion barcodes are scanned worldwide every day,
according to the barcode monitor e-centre.
- BARCODE scanners work by picking up minute variations
in the width of the black lines and the white gaps between
them. The standard 13-digit barcode system can produce ten
thousand billion unique codes.
- BARCODES were immortalised in art by New York pop artist
Bernard Solco. His 1998 exhibition included 20 two-metre
high paintings based on the black-and-white stripes.
- THE first UK barcode was printed on a box of Melrose
100 Century teabags in 1978. The first UK store to have
barcode scanners at the till was Key Markets in Spalding,
Lincs, the following year.
- BARCODES have been the subject of satanic conspiracy
theories. In her book The New Money System 666, published
in 1982, author Mary Stewart Relfe claimed that barcodes
secretly encode the number 666, which is the biblical "mark
of the beast".
- IN the early days, sunlight shining through windows at
the front of stores prevented barcodes from being read.
- WHEN barcodes were first introduced, wine makers refused
to use them on labels because they said bottles were meant
to be "table decoration".
- THE average typist will make one mistake in 300 keystrokes.
But the chance of a barcode error - where the data does
not match the product scanned - is roughly one in a million.
- JAPAN has the most barcode scanning stores per head of
population. A barcode fashion craze swept the country in
1997 with more than a million Tokyo high school girls getting
temporary tattoos in the shape of a barcode.
- IN August 1994, Poetry Review carried a poem consisting
entirely of barcode fragments. Poet Farquharson Cairns claimed
it was "machine-readable".
- THE US army uses 2ft-long barcodes to label 50ft boats
which are in storage at its West Point military academy
in New York. These huge barcodes store information about
the boats' previous travels.
- A NUMBER of ballot papers had to be scrapped in London's
mayoral elections earlier this month after officials accidentally
tore through a crucial barcode when they handed voting papers
to electors.
- TWO- dimensional barcodes, with bars of different heights,
were introduced by US firm Intermec Corporation in 1988.
They can carry 100 times more information than the original
system.
- FUTUROLOGISTS predict that barcodes will eventually be
replaced by radio frequency identification (RFID) tags,
which would be small and cheap enough to be hidden in packaging.
Instead of scanning every item individually, an RFID till
would simply total up every item in your shopping trolley
as it approached.
- TOMY released the Barcode Battler computer game in 1992.
Players insert a barcode into the machine which scans it
and converts it into a character, who is then put into action
in the fight game.
- THE CueCat scanner - a home barcode reader that plugs
into a PC - was released in America in 2000. When users
run it over a barcode printed on a newspaper advert, it
automatically takes you to the relevant website.
- YOU can barcode yourself by logging on to www.barcodeart.com.
Just type in your age, gender, height, weight and country
of origin, and your personal barcode will pop up onscreen,
ready for printing.
- SAFEWAY introduced the first self-scanning store in the
UK in 1995. Shoppers scan items and pay using their credit
or debit card.
- BARCODES save shoppers, retailers and manufacturers £17billion
a year, according to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
- A NEW way of combating fraud was revealed by Russell
Cowburn of Durham University in October of last year. The
system, whereby barcodes are peppered with magnetic particles,
would allow a modified barcode reader to check if the barcode
it scans is forged - and so uncover fake goods.
- LONDON'S Charing Cross Hospital is testing a system where
patients wear a barcoded wristband. When it's scanned, a
drawer in the drugs trolley opens with the right medicine.
- MAD magazine carried a giant barcode on its front cover
in October 1977 with the message: "Hope this issue
jams every computer in the world".
- LANGUAGE experts have pointed out the amazing similarity
of a fifth-century Irish alphabet known as Ogham - which
consists of a series of horizontal lines and gaps - to modern-day
barcodes.
- THE barcodes printed on newspapers differ from others
because they include a digit to represent the day of publication.
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