June 26, 1974. A supermarket in Troy, Ohio.
A man named Clyde Dawson puts a ten pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum on the counter. A cashier named Sharon Buchanan passes it over a glass window in the checkout stand.
Beep.
Sixty seven cents.
That is the first commercial barcode scan in history. The pack of gum is in the Smithsonian.
Gif by hashtagbooked on Giphy
And the reason they chose gum is genuinely charming. The team wanted to prove the technology could read a label on something small and curved, not just a big flat box. So they picked the smallest packaged product in the store.
Now here is why that beep deserves more credit than almost any invention of the last century.
Before the barcode, a store had no idea what it had sold until someone counted it. Prices were stickered onto every individual item by hand. Changing a price meant a person with a sticker gun walking the aisles.