Google logo doodle celebrates bar code patent

Google doodles have made news in the past and this time it is the all too familiar bar code that stares blankly at the visitors to the search engine's homepage that has attracted attention. Hopefully one can presume that the bar code, when decoded, spells Google.

The bar code received a patent this day in 1952 and the patent went to America's Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver, two students of the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia. Their concept of a bar code was a series of concentric circles and not the linear standing lines we see today. The new code was first used in train carriages.

The first retail product to employ bar codes was Wrigley's chewing gum.

There are various ways to format and use a bar code, and currently the Uniform Product Code and Code 128 are popularly used. Google employed the latter, a standard way to encode characters and numerals, to encode its doodle.

Bar codes, it seems, have gone on from commercial use to inspire artists too. On clicking the doodle, one website that occurs in the results is a site devoted to art inspired by bar codes, including a bar code clock.

Supermarkets began to use bar codes when the National Association of Food Chains approved their use. March superstore of Ohio was one of the first supermarkets to use bar codes in 1974.

Bar codes are read by special scanners whose underlying technology traces back to a Nobel prize awarded to three scientists for developing the 'charge-coupled device'. The device converts light into an electric signal.

Google had last done a special doodle on October 2 for celebrating Mahatma Gandhi's birth anniversary. It was recently in news for its special UFO doodle which celebrated a video game.