The first product to be barcoded was chewing gum.
Selvo and Woodland designed the scanner using a newly developed laser beam. On June 26, 1974, the first barcode scanner was installed in a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio.
The entire scanning system consists of 4 scanners, one installed on each of the 4 checkout counters, and then connected to a simple counting computer in the store office. The first item scanned was a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit flavored gum.
This pack of gum is still on display today at the Smithsonian College’s Museum of American History.
Extended information:
Advantages of barcode technology:
1. Fast information collection. Compared with keyboard input, barcode input is 5 times faster and enables instant data input.
2. High reliability. The error rate of keyboard input data is one in three hundred, the error rate of using optical character recognition technology is one in ten thousand, and the error rate of using barcode technology is less than one in a million.
3. The amount of information collected is large. Traditional one-dimensional barcodes can collect information of dozens of characters at a time, and two-dimensional barcodes can carry information of thousands of characters and have certain automatic error correction capabilities.