June 26, 1974 - This was the fateful day when the whole process of grocery shopping was revolutionized forever. It was on this day when Sharon Buchanan, an employee at Marsh Supermarket in Troy, rang up a seemingly insignificant pack of chewing gum for Clyde Dawson, Marsh's head of development and research.
The whole event seems to be utterly normal, mundane, and unamusing to many of us today, but that's only because the supermarket scanner has been a part of our daily lives, and for many of us, we don't remember a time when we went grocery shopping without it waiting for us at the counter.
If we had lived before that time, then not only did we have to wait for the cashier to ring up our groceries, but we even had to check whether the tally was accurate at the end of it all, since store clerks manually entered the price of each item on the cash register, instead of just swiping them on that red laser which automatically identifies the item and how much it costs.
But it was thanks to the invention of Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard "Bob" Silver, who created the bar code system which enabled data to be stored in that rectangular label with lines of varying thickness and numbers written on top, that we are able to enjoy the speed and convenience of grocery shopping today.
Their invention was a remarkable step toward the ease of scanning grocery items. It wasn't until the National Cash Register Company and Spectra-Physics collaborated on developing the Spectra-Physics Model A, or the ancestor of the modern-day supermarket scanner, that the whole landscape of grocery shopping experienced a game-changing breakthrough.
With the new machines, it only took minutes to get through a whole bag of groceries as the device can easily detect loads of information and display them for verification, and it also reduced the number of mistakes that could have been committed with a manual system of input.
The original Spectra-Physics Model A currently sits at the National Museum of American History's electronic collection. Though it was a big, bulky steel-encased machine, much of the magic happened inside, out of sight from people who could care less what was going on. But that was the wonder of "frictionless" technology, something designed to be an "invisible" technology.
Today, we often take it for granted especially with the advent of the self-checkout register. But let's just take a moment to remember that on June 26th, 50 years ago, our lives would forever change.
(Image credit: National Museum of American History)
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