when were barcodes invented

Barcodes were invented in the late 1940s by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver. They filed a patent for the invention in 1949, which was granted in 1952. Their initial design was based on a series of concentric circles, inspired by Morse code. Although they developed a working prototype, the technology was not immediately practical for widespread commercial use due to technological limitations at the time. The first commercial use of barcodes began in the 1960s, with the first official scanning of a Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode in a supermarket occurring on June 26, 1974, in Troy, Ohio, when a pack of chewing gum was scanned.