The history of the barcode and the QR code

Last updated: 09/15/2026

Today we scan codes without a second thought: at the supermarket, on a restaurant menu, to pay for coffee. But behind those grids of black dots lie two stories separated by almost 50 years — a drawing made with fingers in beach sand, and a Japanese engineer who drew inspiration from an ancient board game to solve a car-parts factory problem.

The barcode: born on a beach (1948–1974)

The story starts in 1948, when the owner of a supermarket chain asked Drexel University, in Philadelphia, for a system to automatically read product prices at checkout. Two graduate students, Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver, set out to figure out how to do it.

As the story goes (and Woodland himself confirmed it several times), the final idea came to him while sitting on a Miami Beach shore in early 1949. He already knew Morse code, and started playing in the sand: he dragged four fingers through it, extending Morse's dots and dashes downward into lines. The result was a pattern of concentric circles — a “bullseye” — that encoded information in the width and spacing of the lines. Woodland and Silver patented the idea in 1952, but the technology of the time (no lasers, no cheap computers) made it impractical to actually read.

It took almost 25 years. RCA tested Woodland's circular code at a Kroger supermarket in Cincinnati in 1972, but the ink smeared on the printing presses and the system kept failing. It was George Laurer, an IBM engineer (the company that had hired Woodland), who redesigned the symbol as a series of vertical rectangular lines instead of circles: the UPC (Universal Product Code) was born, far more resistant to printing errors.

On June 26, 1974, at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a real barcode was scanned for the first time during an actual sale: a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum. That very pack is now preserved at the Smithsonian Institution.

The QR code: when Toyota needed to move faster (1994)

Twenty years later, the classic barcode was already showing its limits: it could only hold about 20 characters, and a part often needed several scans to read all its information. That was exactly the problem facing Denso Wave, a Toyota Group company that manufactured auto parts and needed to track every piece on the production line.

In 1994, a team led by engineer Masahiro Hara set out to design a code that could be read much faster and hold far more data. To solve a key problem — getting the scanner to recognize the code no matter what angle it was viewed from — Hara drew inspiration from something rather unexpected: Go, the ancient Japanese board game played with black and white stones. That's where the three large squares you see in the corners of every QR code came from (the “position detection patterns”): they let the reader instantly locate the code, whether it's upright, tilted, or upside down.

The name QR comes from “Quick Response,” a nod to its reading speed. Unlike a barcode, a QR code can store more than 4,000 alphanumeric characters and has built-in error correction: even if up to 30% of the code is damaged or covered (for example, by a logo in the center, like the ones you can add in QR Studio), it still stays readable.

The decision that did the most to speed up its worldwide adoption was a different one: although Denso Wave held the patent, it chose not to enforce its rights over the core technology and released it for anyone to use royalty-free. The QR code became an ISO standard in 2000, and thanks to that openness, any company — including this one — can generate QR codes freely.

From the factory floor to your pocket

For almost 15 years the QR code was used mostly in Japan: factories first, then magazines and advertising, since Japanese phones came with a built-in QR reader from the early 2000s — well before the rest of the world. The real global leap only came with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when almost overnight QR codes became the standard way to view a menu without touching paper, check in to an event, or pay contactless. Today both codes coexist: barcodes still rule supermarkets, while QR codes dominate anything that needs more data, a custom design, or a direct bridge to the internet.