A 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum was the first item ever scanned with a barcode in a store.

On June 26, 1974, at 8:01 a.m., cashier Sharon Buchanan scanned the gum at Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. The pack of gum cost 67 cents. This was the first time a Universal Product Code (UPC) was used in a real sale.The idea for barcodes started in 1948 with Bernard Silver and Norman Joseph Woodland. Woodland first tried using Morse code dots and dashes, but he stretched them into long lines. George Laurer at IBM later designed the rectangular barcode we use today in 1973.The scanner used a laser to read the width of the black bars and white spaces. These widths represent numbers that a computer looks up in a database. This system is called linear symbology because the data is stored in a straight line.The original pack of gum and the store receipt are now kept at the Smithsonian Institution. Today, people scan more than 6 billion barcodes every day around the world. This technology helps stores track their inventory and makes checkout lines move much faster.