3rd April: Bar Code Day

It's Bar Code Day. So here are ten things you may not know about barcodes:

1. The first barcodes were used to label railway cars.
2. The first barcode for groceries was invented by Bernard Silver and Norman Joseph Woodland, who'd been asked by the food chain, Food Fair, to find out if there was a way to read product information at the checkout.
3. The first item ever to be scanned was a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum, in Ohio, in 1974. The gum is now in the Smithsonian museum.
4. In the UK, the first product to have a barcode was Melrose 100 Century teabags in 1978.
5. In China, all barcodes start with a figure eight, because it is pronounced the same way as the word for "prosperity" and is considered to be a lucky number.
6. Talking of numbers, conspiracy theorists have suggested that the Guard bars, the bit containing patterns at the beginning, middle, and end of a barcode, look like the coding for the number 6 and are therefore code for the number of the beast, 666. The developer of the UPC code, George J. Laurer made a statement to reassure people that there was nothing sinister about it, it was a coincidence, like the fact that all three of his names had six letters.
7. By entering personal information at http://www.barcodeart.com/artwork/netart/yourself/index.html you can get your own personal barcode which you can download, print, and scan to find out how much you are worth!
8. Five billion barcodes are scanned worldwide every day.
9. The first barcode scanners were the size of a Washing machine because they contained components that had to be water-cooled.
10. The world's smallest barcode has lines one thousandth of an inch wide. Why so small? Because they were attached to bees to monitor their mating habits.