Standardized barcodes

Barcodes, also known as universal price codes, were invented in 1949 by Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver, who had the idea of vertically extending the dots and dashes of Morse code and using it to encode product data. They secured a patent in 1952, but because scanning technology was in its infancy, their invention went largely unused.

In the early 1970s Haberman, executive vice president of First National Stores in Boston, convened a committee to choose a standard symbol that could be used across America.

Despite resistance from conspiracy theorists, who considered barcodes to be intrusive surveillance technology, and from some Christians who thought the codes hid the number 666, more than five billion of the codes are now scanned in shops worldwide every day; the technology has yielded savings running into the trillions of dollars.

The devil is in the barcode? Oy.