Norman
Joseph Woodland, the
Co-inventor of the barcode passed away on Sunday the 9th. Without his invention the
records storage industry would be nowhere near as efficient and affordable as it
is today. Every day we scan hundreds of barcodes on records storage boxes to
insert and remove your document containers from our inventory. Without the
barcodes it would take minutes instead of seconds to locate the files and boxes
our clients request.
 |
Barcodes in Records Storage |
Woodland was born in Atlantic City, New
Jersey on September 6, 1921. He earned his degree in mechanical engineering
from Drexel University in 1947.
While at the beach, Woodland considered
the problem of how to capture product information automatically at grocery checkout,
recalling how with Morse code dots and dashes are used to send information
electronically, he started to draw dots and dashes in the sand similar to the
shapes used in Morse code. He pulled the dots and dashes downward with his
fingers and produced thin lines from the
dots and thick lines from the dashes, he came up with the concept of a
two-dimensional, linear Morse code, and after sharing it with Bernard Silver,
they applied for a patent on October 20, 1949, receiving U.S. Patent 2,612,994
("Classifying Apparatus and Method") on October 7, 1952.
Woodland was employed by IBM in 1951,
and although Woodland and Silver wanted IBM to develop the technology, it
wasn't commercially feasible, so they sold the patent to Philco in 1952 for
only $15,000. The first item scanned was
a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum in an Ohio supermarket in 1974. Barcodes are
now used everywhere, from grocery stores, to blood banks, airline luggage, and
most importantly to us, they are used within the records storage industry.
When a warehouse holds millions of
records storage boxes there must be a
quick, efficient way to find them. In the past, before barcoding, companies
used paper and pencil and a lot
of man hours to shelve and locate records. Now, thanks
to Woodland’s invention, the technology has reduced the time spent searching
for records from the numerous hours it would take into seconds. The
sophisticated barcode tracking system we use makes it easy to find your
records.
At
Cityside Archives each item and records container for storage receives a
unique barcode. Each shelf position also has a barcode. When we place the box
on the shelf we scan both barcodes, telling our inventory system exactly where
that file and box are located.
To learn more about Cityside Archive’s barcode system or to request a quote
for document management and records storage check out our website at
www.citysidearchives.com.