Something about barcodes

In 1948 Bernard Silver, a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia, USA overheard the president of the local food chain, Food Fair, asking one of the deans to research a system to automatically read product information during checkout.
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Silver told his friend Norman Joseph Woodland about the request, and they started working on a variety of systems.
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Their first working system used ultraviolet ink, but this proved to fade and was fairly expensive.
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Today barcodes are slowly being replaced by RFID tags which offer many advantages over barcodes
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Convinced that the system was workable with further development, Woodland quit his position at Drexel, moved into his father's apartment in Florida, and continued working on the system.
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His next inspiration came from Morse code, and he formed his first barcode from sand on the beach when "I just extended the dots and dashes downwards and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them".
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To read them, he adapted technology from optical soundtracks in movies, using a 500-watt light bulb shining through the paper onto an RCA935 photomultiplier tube (from a movie projector) on the far side.
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He later decided that the system would work better if it were printed as a circle instead of a line, allowing it to be scanned in any direction.
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On 20 October 1949 Woodland and Silver filed a patent application for "Classifying Apparatus and Method", in which they described both the linear and bulls-eye printing patterns, as well as the mechanical and electronic systems needed to read the code.
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The patent was issued on 7 October 1952 as US Patent 2,612,994. In 1951, Woodland moved to IBM and continually tried to interest IBM in developing the system.
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The company eventually commissioned a report on the idea, which concluded that it was both feasible and interesting, but that processing the resulting information would require equipment that was some time off in the future.
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In 1952 Philco purchased their patent, and then sold it to RCA the same year.
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In 1963 Silver died in a car accident.
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As so often the case with innovations someone invents and others profit
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Coming up to today we have RFID codes beginning to take off
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However barcodes are likely to be with us for some time to come\
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So?
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The so is that it is quite helpful to know the origin of an item
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And how to read it
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If you know the first three digits on a bar code then this is possible 
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We show below some country numbers
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Probably important to remember are 690 to  695, which are all for China
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Numbers 00 ~ 13 are for the USA & Canada
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30 ~ 37 France
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40 ~ 44 Germany
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49 ~ Japan
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50 ~ UK
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57 ~ Denmark
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64 ~ Finland
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76 ~ Switzerland and Lienchtenstein
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628 ~ Saudi-Arabia
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629 ~ United Arab Emirates
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740 ~ 745 - Central America
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All 480 Codes are Made in the Philippines
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And so the list goes on and there are other codes such as the European EAN code, similar but not the same as the common barcode
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Just for your information, next time you go out have a look at one

If you get at all serious then you need to remember that often items are shipped around the world then shipped back again so that they can claim a certain country of origin

All sorts of games go on to hide the origin of many items