How the laser beam ushered in the age of big-box

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THERE IS A PREDICTABLE FLOW to the way technological advances change society: ideas trickle out of science, into the churn of commerce, after which they drift into the less predictable eddies of art or fashion or philosophy. But sometimes they venture upstream: from aesthetic speculation into hard science. When H. G. Wells published his groundbreaking novel The War of the Worlds in 1898, he helped invent the genre of science fiction that would play such a prominent role in the popular imagination during the century that followed. But that book introduced a more specific item to the fledging sci-fi canon: the “heat ray,” used by the invading Martians to destroy entire towns. “In some way,” Wells wrote of his technologically savvy aliens, “they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light.”

Top: Poster for the 1953 movie, ‘The War Of The Worlds,” based on the novel by H. G. Wells. Bottom: Martian death ray technology wreaks havoc on Earth in scene from movie.

The heat ray was one of those imagined concoctions that somehow get locked into the popular psyche. From Flash Gordon to Star Trek to Star Wars, weapons using concentrated beams of light became almost de rigueur in any sufficiently advanced future civilization. And yet, actual laser beams did not exist until the late 1950s, and didn’t become part of everyday life for another two decades after that. Not for the first time, the science-fiction authors were a step or two ahead of the scientists.

But the sci-fi crowd got one thing wrong, at least in the short term. There are no death rays, and the closest thing we have to Flash Gordon’s arsenal is laser tag. When lasers did finally enter our lives, they turned out to be lousy for weapons, but brilliant for something the sci-fi authors never imagined: figuring out the cost of a stick of chewing gum.

After winning a 30-year legal battle, Dr. Gordon Gould holds his patent for the laser.

LIKE THE LIGHTBULB, the laser was not a single invention; instead, as the technology historian Jon Gertner puts it, in his wonderful book on Bell Labs, The Idea Factory, “it was the result of a storm of inventions during the 1960s.” Its roots lie in research at Bell Labs and Hughes Aircraft and, most entertainingly, in the independent tinkering of physicist Gordon Gould, who memorably notarized his original design for the laser in a Manhattan candy store, and who went on to have a thirty-year legal battle over the laser patent (a battle he eventually won). A laser is a prodigiously concentrated beam, light’s normal chaos reduced down to a single, ordered frequency. “The laser is to ordinary light,” Bell Lab’s John Pierce once remarked, “as a broadcast signal is to static.”

Unlike the lightbulb, however, the early interest in the laser was not motivated by a clear vision of a consumer product. Researchers knew that the concentrated signal of the laser could be used to embed information more efficiently than could existing electrical wiring, but exactly how that bandwidth would be put to use was less evident. “When something as closely related to signaling and communication as this comes along,” Pierce explained at the time, “and something is new and little understood, and you have the people who can do something about it, you’d just better do it, and worry later just about the details of why you went into it.” Eventually, laser technology would prove crucial to digital communications, thanks to its role in fiber optics. But the laser’s first critical application would appear at the checkout counter, with the emergence of bar-code scanners in the mid-1970s.

The idea of creating some kind of machine-readable code to identify products and prices had been floating around for nearly half a century. Inspired by the dashes and dots of Morse code, an inventor named Norman Joseph Woodland designed a visual code that resembled a bull’s-eye in the 1950s, but it required a five-hundred-watt bulb — almost ten times brighter than your average lightbulb — to read the code, and even then it wasn’t very accurate. Scanning a series of black-and-white symbols turned out to be the kind of job that lasers immediately excelled at, even in their infancy. By the early 1970s, just a few years after the first working lasers debuted, the modern system of bar codes — known as the Universal Product Code — emerged as the dominant standard. On June 26, 1974, a stick of chewing gum in a supermarket in Ohio became the first product in history to have its bar code scanned by a laser. The technology spread slowly: only one percent of stores had bar-code scanners as late as 1978. But today, almost everything you can buy has a bar code on it.

IN 2012, AN ECONOMICS PROFESSOR named Emek Basker published a paper that assessed the impact of bar-code scanning on the economy, documenting the spread of the technology through both mom-and-pop stores and big chains. Basker’s data confirmed the classic trade-offs of early adoption: most stores that integrated bar-code scanners in the early years didn’t see much benefit from them, since employees had to be trained to use the new technology, and many products didn’t have bar codes yet. Over time, however, the productivity gains became substantial, as bar codes became ubiquitous. But the most striking discovery in Basker’s research was this: the productivity gains from bar-code scanners were not evenly distributed. Big stores did much better than small stores.

The UPC code on a box of food is dragged across an optical scanner window in a supermarket checkout line.

There have always been inherent advantages to maintaining a large inventory of items in a store: the customer has more options to choose from, and items can be purchased in bulk from wholesalers for less money. But in the days before bar codes and other forms of computerized inventory-management tools, the benefits of housing a vast inventory were largely offset by the costs of keeping track of everything. If you kept a thousand items in stock instead of a hundred, you needed more people and time to figure out which sought-after items needed restocking and which were just sitting on the shelves taking up space. But bar codes and scanners greatly reduced the costs of maintaining a large inventory. The decades after the introduction of the bar-code scanner in the United States witnessed an explosion in the size of retail stores; with automated inventory management, chains were free to balloon into the epic big-box stores that now dominate retail shopping.

Without bar-code scanning, the modern shopping landscape of Target and Best Buy and supermarkets the size of airport terminals would have had a much harder time coming into being. If there was a death ray in the history of the laser, it was the metaphoric one directed at the mom-and-pop, indie stores demolished by the big-box revolution.