Editing Barcode (section)

===Collins at Sylvania===
During his time as an undergraduate, [[David Jarrett Collins]] worked at the [[Pennsylvania Railroad]] and became aware of the need to automatically identify railroad cars. Immediately after receiving his master's degree from [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology|MIT]] in 1959, he started work at [[Sylvania Electric Products|GTE Sylvania]] and began addressing the problem. He developed a system called ''KarTrak'' using blue, white and red reflective stripes attached to the side of the cars, encoding a four-digit company identifier and a six-digit car number.<ref name="story"/> Light reflected off the colored stripes was read by [[photomultiplier]] vacuum tubes.<ref>{{cite web | url =https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601032/david-collins-sm-59/ | title =David Collins, SM '59: Making his mark on the world with bar codes | last =Dunn | first =Peter | date =20 October 2015 | website =technologyreview.com | publisher =MIT | access-date =2 December 2019 | archive-date =10 November 2018 | archive-url =https://web.archive.org/web/20181110013152/https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601032/david-collins-sm-59/ | url-status =live }}</ref>

The [[Boston and Maine Railroad]] tested the KarTrak system on their gravel cars in 1961. The tests continued until 1967, when the [[Association of American Railroads]] (AAR) selected it as a standard, [[automatic car identification]], across the entire North American fleet. The installations began on 10 October 1967. However, the [[1970s#Economy|economic downturn]] and rash of bankruptcies in the industry in the early 1970s greatly slowed the rollout, and it was not until 1974 that 95% of the fleet was labeled. To add to its woes, the system was found to be easily fooled by dirt in certain applications, which greatly affected accuracy. The AAR abandoned the system in the late 1970s, and it was not until the mid-1980s that they introduced a similar system, this time based on radio tags.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Graham-White|first=Sean |date=August 1999|title=Do You Know Where Your Boxcar Is?|journal=Trains |volume=59 |issue=8 |pages=48–53 }}</ref>

The railway project had failed, but a toll bridge in New Jersey requested a similar system so that it could quickly scan for cars that had purchased a monthly pass. Then the US Post Office requested a system to track trucks entering and leaving their facilities. These applications required special [[retroreflector]] labels. Finally, [[Whiskas|Kal Kan]] asked the Sylvania team for a simpler (and cheaper) version which they could put on cases of pet food for inventory control.