This article was inspired by the news of the death of the UPC inventor

George Laurer, the creator of the Uniform Product Code (UPC), found on millions of items worldwide, and scanned billions of times per day, passed away Friday December 5th, 2019. He was 94.

“George Laurer was a consultant for IBM before he established the 12-digit bar code that is now used on  products in stores. In 1971 the company’s management  asked Laurer if he could design an optical code that would be innovative for the grocery industry that would remain in use and eventually be adopted by other merchandise producing companies. Laurer also created a symbol to accompany the bar code and after three submitted proposals, the UPC bar code was born. Laurer also played a substantial role in the development of scanning equipment that would read each UPC symbol every time an item was purchased at the checkout counter. In the UPC bar code, The first 6 numbers starts with a 0 followed by the manufacturer’s number, which is 5 numbers. The last 6 numbers identify the item the bar code is affixed to. The first product that bore Laurer’s bar code was a pack of  Wrigley’s chewing gum sold at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio.”

From above article, we can know George Laurer is the Inventor of the UPC. He started to develop UPC in 1971. IBM introduced this product in 1973, and on June 26 the following year, the first barcode transaction was conducted at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio.

As we all know, in our daily life, UPC is here and there, due to decades of history, it's widely used on products now. And UPC is a very common way to identify commodities at present, each product needs to apply for a UPC bar code. Of course, not only UPC is used in commodity applications, but also in several important areas.

01/ Retail industry
02/ E-commerce logistics
03/ Warehouse management

......

The areas is more than we can list. 

Human beings are wise and have been advancing all the time. We can invent bar code to record information， and bar code scanner to read bar code information. All this is so wonderful. hope we can make good use of these two tools that bring great convenience to our lives. Tribute to the inventor.