SCANNING'S KITTY HAWK

David Merrefield

Last year at just this time the industry marked the 20th anniversary of the first nonexperimental use of in-store scanning.

It was in late June 1974 that the first supermarket scanner went into commercial use. The first scanning store was a Marsh Supermarkets unit in Troy, Ohio. SN offered several news articles about scanning's birthday last year.

But, of course, the history of scanning didn't really start at that time, 21 years ago almost to the day. There is quite an interesting history behind the development of scanning hardware, and of the product code itself.

Lately, I've been brought up to date on that history by A. John Esserian, now president of Second Dimension Data in North Scituate, Mass. That company is the successor to Charecogn Systems, which developed some of the first concepts that led to product scanning. ("Charecogn" derives from the words "character recognition.")

It seems that many years prior to scanning's debut at the Marsh supermarket, Charecogn was at work putting together hardware that would read a product symbol it had developed, as were other firms. Charecogn's functioning design was premised on a circular "wagon-wheel" design. "What Charecogn did was to put together hardware to form a device that could successfully read our wagon-wheel symbol," John told me the other day. "I like to call that the 'Kitty Hawk' of scanning because just as the Wright brothers didn't need to invent the engine to make a working airplane, we didn't need to invent all the hardware for scanning. What we did was to put together the parts in such a way that it all worked."

A news article published in the March 16, 1970, issue of SN -- perhaps one of the earliest ever published anywhere on the topic -- describes the optical-reading scanner at length. It also makes some interesting observations about scanning -- and its potential to drive change -- that were surprisingly on the mark. As the article describes the new scanning device -- with its handheld "magic wand" reader -- "the checker holds the scanner over each item, causing an audible 'beep.' " Then, "the Charecogn checkout equipment (which resembles a register) immediately computes the information and the price lights up in full view of the customer."

It goes on to quote John as saying the system might prove useful in eliminating unit pricing, that price changes could be made on the shelf alone, that sale prices could be offered with little preparation and that in warehouses, codes could facilitate product sorting. All those predictions were on the money, although the elimination of unit pricing didn't go too smoothly.

One prediction he made that fell short was that stores might use big price-change boards, similar to schedule-announcement boards in train stations, to list sale prices. But it's not so bad an idea, is it? Charecogn was far from the only company working on scanning at the time. Some experiments reached back decades. And, by the early 1970s, working product-code symbols were proffered by Litton, RCA, Singer, NCR, Pitney-Bowes, IBM and several others.

The outpouring of incompatible symbols raised the issue of which should go into industrywide use; which should become the Universal Product Code. So seven industry trade associations formed an ad hoc committee to decide which symbol should be selected. On the committee were representatives of associations, manufacturers, retailers and wholesalers. The effort was coordinated by McKinsey & Co.

Then, in April 1973, committee members selected a slight modification of the IBM symbol to become the UPC. It's the same one now in general use. John's circular symbol lost out because, he said, an IBM-like linear symbol was judged to be the easiest to print accurately on the "millions and millions of units the grocery industry sells."

Now, all these years later, John Essarian is still working on making something out of his now-eclipsed wagon-wheel scanning symbol concept. "The company continues to develop the wagon-wheel symbol for use in the medical industry," he told me. "It can be put on the top of test tubes to identify them. A needle can even be put through the center of a tube top, with the symbol on it, without harming the symbol. We're also working on a trinary code that uses two-color printing to pack more data into a very small space." Will perseverance pay off for John? Who knows? But, taking a broader outlook, I wonder if any industry issue will again rise to the level of importance that attached to scanning -- a level that made real industrywide cooperation and decision enforcement possible.