Happy 50th birthday to the UPC barcode – no one expected you would revolutionize global commerce

Beep.& Virusowy/E+ via Getty Images by Jordan Frith, Clemson University The first modern barcode was scanned 50 years ago this summer – on a 10-pack of chewing gum in a grocery store in Troy, Ohio. Fifty is ancient for most technologies, but barcodes are still going strong. More than 10 billion barcodes are scanned every day around the world. And newer types of barcode symbols, such as QR codes, have created even more uses for the technology. I would have been like most people, never giving a second thought to the humble barcode, if my research as a media scholar at Clemson University hadn’t taken a few strange turns. Instead, I spent a year of my life digging through the archives and old newspaper articles to learn about the barcode’s origins – and eventually went on to write a book about the cultural history of the barcode. While the barcode didn’t herald the end times, as conspiracy theorists once fretted, it did usher in a new age in global commerce. Barcodes were a grocery-industry invention While the world has changed a lot since the mid-1970s, the Universal Product Code (UPC) – what most people think of when they hear the...