BAR CODES: 25 YEARS OF CALCULATIONS AT REGISTERS

Debbie Street scanned a customer's purchases at ShopKo in Cape Girardeau.

Mad Magazine turned an entire cover into a bar code.

You might remember the cover.

Alfred E. Newman ("What, Me Worry?") a favorite of the Mad Magazine gang, was featured on the cover of the October 1979 issue, mowing down the bar code, which stretched across the bottom of the cover.

Enough of the bar code was left for it to register the 1979 price of the magazine -- "75-cents cheap" -- when it crossed the scanner.

The Mad cover came five years after the bar-code had been "officially" introduced to the grocery supermarket scene.

At that time, the bar code was still new on the scene, even though the concept had been around for a half-century, in one form or another.

Today, the bar code is as common as UFOs and aliens.

It is used to process mail, identify hospital patients, move airline baggage and track packages.

If you purchase a piece of lumber, a bar code can be found on it. Almost every grocery item will have a bar code. The codes appear on auto parts, logs, even marathon runners.

Bar codes are used in the railroad business to keep track of which cars go with which engines. The codes could be seen on the side of many railroad cars.

The codes have been used in bees to track their mating habits.

The UPC bar code was first used in a supermarket in June 1974, and the first item scanned was a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum in Troy, Ohio. The price of the gum: 67 cents.

That was the start; the rest is history.

Four years later, only 1 percent of the nation's supermarkets used the bar code. Within a decade, it was 33 percent, and today, it's about 60 percent.

Although the supermarket industry was instrumental in pushing for some type of mechanical pricing, bar codes are everywhere in the retail business.

Retail operators say the bar code makes for easier and quicker training for retailing.

"It's all I know," said one clerk, as she whipped a couple of items past the scanner and into the waiting hands of a sacker. Eight sacks of groceries, $134.38

"I don't know what we'd do now without the bar code," said Dennis Marchi, manager of the Schnucks Cape Girardeau store. "We use it for everything -- checking out and keeping tabs on inventory."

As recently as 10 years ago, scanners failed to read about 30 percent of the bar codes on the first pass, primarily because of poorly printed code labels.

Better quality lasers and improved scanners have dropped the error rate to almost zero.

Virtually all grocery stores of any size use scanners now, in part because wholesalers demand it so they (and retailers) can talk to each other, keeping tabs on inventory.

The heart of the scanner is a small laser. It shoots a beam of light that passes through a lens and strikes a mirror mounted on a spinner.

Complicated? Read on:

The laser beam is swept in a circle and bounced off more mirrors (where all these mirrors are), producing more than 2,000 scan lines a second, each zapping the label at a different angle.

One of those scan lines hits the bar code. The beam bounces back and the scanner collects, measures and decodes the patterns of reflected light.

It comes up with a series of numbers that shoots into the store's database to find the price. At the same time, the transaction might adjust the store's inventory records, and even trigger replacement orders.

The bar code printed on a can or box is a series of lines and spaces read as numbers. The first digit corresponds to a class of goods, such as meat. The next five digits are the manufacturer's code, and the next five are specific to the item.

The 12th digit is a control, using a formula based on the preceding numbers that allow the scanner to check its math.

The industry is developing scanning systems that will help trace problems in the food supply faster and to better manage inventory.

When an item is purchased, the scanning system will also alert the wholesale company that the item has been sold.

Simple, huh?

George J. Laurer was primarily responsible for the first UPC bar code, which carries patent No. 3,029,019, presented in 1962, Laurer's second patent connected with the code came a decade ago, No. 4,728,789.

Laurer was working with IBM, when he came up with the working UPC code.

A consulting firm, representing the grocery industry, put out a call for a workable code of some type. Many companies responded.

Laurer detailed his bar code and submitted three plans in May 1973. Laurer's IBM Co.'s code was selected, and a year later, it was introduced.

Bar codes now use a number of scanners, including the wand scanners, laser scanners and touch screens.

The bar code idea dates back more than 75 years. In 1923, the son of a grocery wholesaler wrote a paper at Harvard Business School about "automatic calculators for the supermarket," but the idea never got beyond the written stage.

More than 50 years ago, other means of automatic calculations were studied, including a "Bull's-Eye Code," which was used at one time in a Kroger Store.

The "Bull's-eye" was just that, a round-code that included four white lines on a dark background.

But it wasn't until Laurer and IBM introduced the bar-code concept that automatic calculations really caught on.