🛒 What was the first thing scanners bought?

See all those shops we're passing? At their checkouts, a little red light reads black stripes on every box. Those stripes are called a barcode. So here's a question. What was the very first thing ever bought with a barcode scanner at a grocery store? A giant cake? A shiny bike?

Nope! It was a pack of chewing gum! It happened at a supermarket in Ohio, about fifty years ago. A brand new, super fancy machine, and its very first job was gum! Here's how it works. The stripes are thick and thin, like a secret code. The scanner shines light on them.

White parts bounce the light back, and black stripes soak it up, like a sponge soaks up water. A computer reads that pattern like a name tag, and beep! It knows the price. People say the idea began with a man drawing dots and dashes in beach sand, then pulling them into long lines. Now look around the car. Can you find a barcode on a bottle, a bag, or a book? Count the stripes!

On this drive past houses, hills and a gas station, there's a good chance that station's little shop has a scanner at the counter. A scanner reads barcodes, those rows of black and white stripes on almost everything you buy. So what do you think was the very first thing a store ever scanned? Hold your guess. Our story starts with an inventor named Norman Joseph Woodland, sitting on a beach. He knew Morse code, the old dots and dashes, and he drew them in the sand. Then he dragged his fingers down and stretched them into long lines, thin ones and thick ones.

Stripes that could hold a secret number! He and his partner, Bernard Silver, patented the idea in 1952. But there was a problem: no machine could read it yet. They waited more than twenty years. Here's how it finally worked. A laser shines on the stripes. White stripes bounce the light back, and black stripes soak it up, so the scanner sees a pattern of flashes.

The computer turns that pattern into numbers and looks up the price, faster than you can blink. Then, in 1974, at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a cashier slid the first item across the brand-new scanner, and it was a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum! All that brainpower, and the big test was gum. That little pack ended up in a museum. And now nearly everything in every store wears stripes, all thanks to lines in the sand.