The Origin of the Bar Code

The now inescapable bar code celebrates its 57th anniversary Wednesday—a milestone unmissed by Google, which replaced its home page logo with a bar code "doodle" that translates to "Google." Now used to track just about anything bought and sold in many countries, the standard bar code system was patented in the United States on October 7, 1952, but took about 20 years to go mainstream.